Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by h4l0 » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 11:11 AM UTC

arghwhat wrote: post #14

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…

and think that they actually didn't get a job at teaching programming but they involved in politics and appointed as "Minister of Technology" for their "loyalty" to the Head of State. That's what Turkey is dealing with right now.

5 or 6 years ago, our ex-minister, claimed that it is dangerous to work with computers since they can be challenging for the mind in a conference about cloud computing. Let that sink in.

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

#32

Post by oefrha » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 11:11 AM UTC

aortega wrote: post #22

trimboffle wrote: post #3

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).

tkinter wants to have a word. See also wxPython, PyQt, etc. Not saying they’re as easy as Delphi.

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

#33

Post by nottorp » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 11:12 AM UTC

gaspoweredcat wrote: post #5

i have no idea why delphi still seems so popular in the middle east, a large number of mobile phone tools are still coded in delphi but ive never really understood why

Before everything came with an UI builder, there was only Visual Basic (before dot niet) and Delphi for building UIs quickly. But with VB you needed to switch to C++ for low level functionality, while with Delphi you could just do it in the same project. Including inline assembly.

Those days are gone, but the legacy still remains.

For this deal though, I guess Embarcadero is desperately looking for something that looks like a sale. All the cool kids in the west have switched to shit web UIs and they're probably left only with a few legacy customers.

Edit: Yes, the deal is most likely bribery. Doesn't make Embarcadero less desperate. Their fault for going enterprise and pricing Delphi out of a hobbyist's reach.

Edit 2: Sheesh, cheapest Delphi license is 1699 eur... back before Borland (sorry, Inprise) got sold i think it started at 300...

Edit 3: It's still much cheaper than Qt at 5500/year. This is how great platforms die.

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

#34

Post by mar77i » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 11:12 AM UTC

aortega wrote: post #22

trimboffle wrote: post #3

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).

We do have webbrowsers for GUI widgets and beyond these days. By that metric, Javascript would definitely be a more relevant option.

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

#35

Post by Koshkin » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

gdm85 wrote: post #28

arghwhat wrote: post #14

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

But when the cause is just...

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

#36

Post by Andrew_nenakhov » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

arghwhat wrote: post #14

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…

Borland C and Pascal were great for learning programming in mid-90s, because of one crucial feature: an immensely good built in help reference.

Whenever you wanted to know syntax of some command, you print this command, press ctrl-f1 and is presented with docs, complete with a working example. It was insanely great. Remember, stack overflow didn't exist then.

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

#37

Post by zozbot234 » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 11:15 AM UTC

arghwhat wrote: post #14

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…

I wonder if anyone has come up with a TurboC-like UI "theme" for, e.g. Emacs. Freepascal uses a Turbo-like UI by default and a free reimplementation known as RHIDE is already (IIRC) part of the FreeDOS distribution, so recreating the UI itself shouldn't be too hard. It might be a fun way to boost adoption of these terminal-based tools, since the ergonomics and UX is in fact quite reminiscent of modern IDE's.

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

#38

Post by Leace » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 11:15 AM UTC

vallode wrote: post #25

_lbaq wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

IMO this is a limited view on what students need to learn to be valuable on the market. Delphi teaches you the value of experimentation through small feedback loops. For novices that just start programming this is critically important.

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

#39

Post by phendrenad2 » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 11:15 AM UTC

Professional programmers scoff at "old" languages like this, but they forget what it's like to not know the first thing about programming, or what GCC is, or how it's different from Clang, or if you need to install Linux to use it, or if you're making a huge mistake by using C++ instead of Rust, or if maybe Go is better, or why that one person said something about GraphQL, or if you need to install a virtual env for your python.

Delphi just installs with a double-click and you can write code in a box and it runs.

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

#40

Post by aortega » Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 11:15 AM UTC

mar77i wrote: post #34

aortega wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

We do have webbrowsers for GUI widgets and beyond these days. By that metric, Javascript would definitely be a more relevant option.

Try to create a browser gui application using javascript, see how many resources it uses and how much time it takes you compared with Delphi, and just then, get out of my lawn.