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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 dama…
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 wouldn't call Delphi ancient. It's not like they haven't been updating it. Delphi can target Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and Linux. It's pretty good:
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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.
Stack Overflow has dumbed people down significantly because of the mental laziness it engenders. In a time before the internet, it used to be that books, and occasionally magazines, were the initial entry points to understanding software, hardware and electronics. Then the BBS came along, these secret islands of knowledge and trade. I learned Pascal and assembly on Turbo Pascal with trial-and-error and lots of contex…
We aren’t nearly as close as you suggest do the level of code generation that would replace the bottom quarter of the labor pool even, but if that day ever comes I believe it will be really profitable for the top 20-30%.
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Stack Overflow has dumbed people down significantly because of the mental laziness it engenders. In a time before the internet, it used to be that books, and occasionally magazines, were the initial entry points to understanding software, hardware and electronics. Then the BBS came along, these secret islands of knowledge and trade. I learned Pascal and assembly on Turbo Pascal with trial-and-error and lots of contex…
I would argue that StackOverflow itself is not a problem—it is instead the laziness of many in the "newer" generations of programmers. StackOverflow has many great explanations, which are no different than reading a chapter in a book (it's just a book that is extremely relevant to you problem). The problem is that lazy people demand code dumps, and lazy people provide code dumps instead of explanations. This then bec…
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It's a commercial product. Why on earth would you teach the kids something that they won't be able to use afterwards, when there are plenty of alternatives without that constraint? It's like teaching kids to use Office, without even having the ubiquity argument.
It's about the logic, not so much about the syntax. And the office comparison is not valid, knowing Office is for many a very valuable skill.
So... Why Delphi then? And yes, many people do have a habit of sticking to exactly the environment that they were taught in. Defaults matter.
> And the office comparison is not valid, knowing Office is for many a very valuable skill.
As I mentioned in the other half of that paragraph, yes, you can make an argument for Office being valuable because of its ubiquity.
But that's a circular argument. Office is ubiquitous because they managed to convince educators, and now that seems to have made it basically impossible to kill off.
Trying to bootstrap something similar for Delphi is inexcusable.
I was curious a little while ago whether Delphi or something similar was still available for modern computers (I think it followed from the same question about MS Access and VB6). Turns out there's a free Delphi-compatible IDE called Lazarus: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
Has anyone here used Lazarus? It looks great from its description but I'd be interested in an independent opinion.
However, in my personal opinion, Pascal has not really kept up with the sort of creature comforts that nowadays even C++ affords the programmer. The IDE (Delphi or Lazarus) also don't provide the kind of help Eclipse gives you when using Java, even though Pascal may feel as verbose sometimes.
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The key question is: should it be so? Or: wouldn't the world be a better place if we had some equilibrium between web and desktop apps?
No. But I can see this thread is populated with Delphi diehards.
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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?
As someone who had to use Eiffel, of all things, in college, I may be biased in this :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Stack Overflow has dumbed people down significantly because of the mental laziness it engenders. In a time before the internet, it used to be that books, and occasionally magazines, were the initial entry points to understanding software, hardware and electronics. Then the BBS came along, these secret islands of knowledge and trade. I learned Pascal and assembly on Turbo Pascal with trial-and-error and lots of contex…
> Progress is neither linear, increasing nor assured, and much is lost, reinvented not necessarily as well and lost again.
The big difference is that we are now networked. The target MSDOS environment was not a moving target and had no security considerations. The world is very different now; we do so much programming in the browser because it's the one single cross-platform zero-friction environment we have. But those reasons also make it a battleground between platform monopolists.
There is also so much more software. Part of the problem that Stackoverflow solves is dealing with this. You can't be an expert on everything, there isn't enough time and it moves too fast. So you need a quick solution to incidental problems so you can get back to the "core" problem.
(credentials: the code I wrote at age sixteen for doing 3D rendering https://github.com/pjc50/ancient-3d-for-turboc )
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