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Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

jonlennartaasenden.wordpress.com

21–30 of 352 posts

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#21
I too have a soft spot for Object Pascal but

> Getting object-pascal back into universities and education is very important. Not just for Delphi as a product and Embarcadero as a company, but to ensure that the next generation of software developers are given a firm grasp on fundamental programming concepts; concepts that represent the building-blocks that all software rests on; a curriculum that has taken heavy damage from the adoption of Java and C# in the early 2K’s.

doesn’t sound very convincing. Not a Java fan at all and never used C# since AFAIK it’s mostly used in the Microsoft ecosystem (I heard very good things about it though), but what fundamental concepts can’t be taught in a Java & C# curriculum that can be with Delphi? The article unfortunately doesn’t expand on that.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#22

I have a soft spot for Delphi but this is odd. Delphi has seen its day. Any number of other languages can be taught for free... python is probably a more relevant choice.

> python is probably a more relevant choice.

Python doesn't have any standard graphical IDE or even GUI widgets. No modern language can create GUI applications with the ease of use of Delphi, except maybe .NET (which is based on Delphi).

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#24
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delphi is still very relevant when building desktop applications.

Which is rather not where the world has been going towards in the last decade or so.

The number of small scale desktop applications (like restaurant accounting/billing or tax management) in Turkey or similar markets exceeds all forms of mobile/web apps combined. In my home town in Iran, C# desktop developer is the number one job offer for the last 10-15 years. The market is full of small businesses that need simple desktop apps to run the business.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#25
post #4

Next up: COBOL?

There is nothing wrong Delphi, other than it's largely a niche language

But as educational tooling is that not a fault in itself? Surely we should be preparing students to at least use some mainstream languages, rather than pouring their skills and time into something that has a niche market value?

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#27
post #12
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delphi is still very relevant when building desktop applications.

Is it? Can it compete with c# or swift for desktop applications?

Yes. In the sense that neither C# nor, especially, Swift are suitable as teaching languages. (Nor is Python, BTW.)

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#28

This reminds me of a few ( I then found out that they were being taught to use Borland Turbo C . I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its a…

Since the details of the deal are not public, I will give you another possible speculative scenario: bribery :P

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#29

I had to giggle recently when I heard "Delphi is dead". It's not. And I don't think it ever will, because, both as a language and work environment, it is quite powerful. It has pretty low entry barriers, and is pretty capable. When I used it (as a hobbiest, during Delphi 5 and Delphi 7 times), it had a superb tooling, and a really efficient compiler. Everything "just worked". It's now 15 - 20 years ago, when we creat…

Totally agreed. I was fortunate enough to start real programming with Delphi 5 (and then 7). Nowadays I know dozens of languages and frameworks but nothing comes close to the experience of quickly prototyping apps that at the end looked good, didn't need any dependencies and were super-small.

Another benefit was that it was possible to interoperate with low-level Win32 API and the enormous component library provided by third-party authors.

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