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Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

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

#81

Post by jmull »

devpts11 wrote: post #61
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #36

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…

The stackoverflow just makes it easy to look up trivia. The internet in general makes it easy to look up answers to simple problems.

That leaves more time for the interesting problems. I think that makes programmers generally smarter than before. They start from a higher base and can climb more quickly.

Also, you’re overestimating the potential trajectory of current approaches to AI.

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

#82

Post by pjc50 »

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).

.NET is definitely the easiest possible way to do a widget UI, but it's not based on Delphi in any meaningful sense. Its closest ancestor is Java, via the short lived "J++" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B

(Android later did basically the same thing with Dalvik)

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

#83

Post by aNoob7000 »

devpts11 wrote: post #61
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #36

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…

Since the early days of my career, people keep predicting the demise of the programmer. I remember CASE tools, and then Microsoft with VB were signs of the end. Roll forward 30+ years in IT, and complexity keeps going up, and programmers are still needed.

Maybe I'm just old, but I'm probably going to retire, and AI is not going to replace any programmers.

From what I see, the quality of the software in Corporate America reassures me that programmers will have jobs for many decades to come.

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

#84

Post by agumonkey »

zozbot234 wrote: post #46
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #36

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.

QuickBASIC works the same way. Rust doesn't really build its help documentation for "built-in" access in the programming environment (everything is web-based, even "local" docs launch in a web browser) but examples are a first-class feature; they're reused as test cases.

Talking about that, rust html docs gobs a whopping 400MB (2/3 of the install size IIRC). When compressed they're 22MB.

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

#85

Post by downandout »

MrGilbert wrote: post #8

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…

I use Delphi on a daily basis to code internally-used marketing automation tools. There is nothing that comes remotely close to it in terms of ease of debugging and overall productivity. There are better languages/tools to use for public-facing products, but for "I just need it to run" type projects, it works flawlessly.

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

#86

Post by jonathanstrange »

zwaps wrote: post #59

I mean, one may assume incompetence and corruption. And perhaps that's the case. But on the other hand, teaching languages are not the same as production languages. There are a number of languages that may be more powerful, but I think Delphi is a decent choice for teaching. * You want to teach principles. Delphi allows you to teach OOP principles. You may or may not agree that OOP should be the starting paradigm, bu…

I don't think the motivation is teaching-related at all. For teaching there are way better languages than Object Pascal, which is kind of outdated and has a lot of anachronisms.

However, Delphi is an outstanding tool for production and together with Freepascal/Lazarus one of the best options for cross-platform application development - certainly on a par with C++/Qt. So this is a pretty smart move of Turkey to get some innovation going, and I expect great new end-user applications to come from Turkey during the next 10 years.

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

#87

Post by bluedino »

aNoob7000 wrote: post #83
devpts11 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Since the early days of my career, people keep predicting the demise of the programmer. I remember CASE tools, and then Microsoft with VB were signs of the end. Roll forward 30+ years in IT, and complexity keeps going up, and programmers are still needed. Maybe I'm just old, but I'm probably going to retire, and AI is not going to replace any programmers. From what I see, the quality of the software in Corporate Amer…

Visual Basic might be second to only PHP in the amount of terrible code it has allowed shadetree porogrammers to create.

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

#88

Post by mastry »

zwaps wrote: post #59

I mean, one may assume incompetence and corruption. And perhaps that's the case. But on the other hand, teaching languages are not the same as production languages. There are a number of languages that may be more powerful, but I think Delphi is a decent choice for teaching. * You want to teach principles. Delphi allows you to teach OOP principles. You may or may not agree that OOP should be the starting paradigm, bu…

I’m curious... how could c# cost more when the language is open source and Visual Studio Community is free?

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

#89

Post by bluedino »

arghwhat wrote: post #55
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point, but the rationale might be completely different. Most programmers nowadays focus on web programming. The main reasons for this are partly technical (easy deployment, easier upgrades, multi-platform) and partly political (subscription model, complete control of user data). Now, a minority of us believe that desktop apps are really worth fighting for. They are fast, they give user control over their d…

You missed the point: Borland Turbo C was a proprietary compiler and IDE that had its last release in 1988 (replaced by Borland Turbo C++, which died sometime in the 90's). It has no relevance in this day and age. If you teach C, at least teach C99 using a contemporary compiler—C11 was available when this all occurred. At no point did I suggest that a different language or paradigm should have been taught.

Nothing like people asking why conio.h doesn't exist in MODERN_C_COMPILER

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

#90

Post by zer0tonin »

trimboffle wrote: post #56
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm definitely not a Delphi diehard, but I tend to think it's a good thing to have computation done on my largely powerful enough, instead of it being done on a small VM at the other side of the world which doesn't provide me with any control over my data.
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