Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

jonlennartaasenden.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 352 posts

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

#121

Post by FpUser »

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…

You should wake up and take a look. It is anything but ancient. It is mature but feature wise it kept up.

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

#123

Post by Wiretrip »

h4l0 wrote: post #9

I really don't want to sound cynical about this great initiative(!) but it saddens me that among many open modern languages and tools, they instead opted for Delphi. I cannot think of a single positive reason behind this decision in 2020. All I can think of is that the people that came to this conclusion are the ones who graduated from Computer Science related studies in ~1998-2004~ and immediately got themselves in…

Positive reasons: 1) It runs out of the box without and Internet ocnnection. 2) The IDE is extremely good. 3) It teaches OOP and memory management (something often forgotten by today's programmers). 4) It is capable of giving very low level access to the host machine (like C). 5) You can even use (and teach) tricky things like pointers.

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

#124

Post by Wiretrip »

blub wrote: post #104
h4l0 wrote: post #9

I really don't want to sound cynical about this great initiative(!) but it saddens me that among many open modern languages and tools, they instead opted for Delphi. I cannot think of a single positive reason behind this decision in 2020. All I can think of is that the people that came to this conclusion are the ones who graduated from Computer Science related studies in ~1998-2004~ and immediately got themselves in…

The only reasonable alternative is Qt, but C++ is more complicated than Pascal. Assuming they would want to try their hand at making money out of what they learn, they could target the kind of companies which were served by VB6 or FoxPro in the past :) Anything web-based is ridiculously complicated and has worse performance.

Actually a very good alternative would be Java and JavaFX, maybe using Eclipse as the IDE.

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

#125

Post by tartoran »

mastry wrote: post #88
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?

They probably kept in mind brain drain factor. Delphi isn’t all that bad though, it’s actually great to learn programming

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

#126

Post by Accacin »

kragen wrote: post #97
phendrenad2 wrote: post #39

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…

> Professional programmers scoff at "old" languages like this Old languages? Delphi is a lot newer than C. C in a mostly modern form dates from about 1977; Delphi is from 1995. If you want to just write code in a box and have it run, maybe you should use http://sketchpad.cc/ or https://jsfiddle.net/ . Or code.labstack.com, intervue.io, codepad, codiva.io, paiza.io, compilr, ideone, onlinegdb, repl.it, rextester, myco…

I love the fact that you completely ignore that a large percentage of people do not have internet access, and even if they do it can be very slow.

Just because Delphi isn't cool doesn't mean it's not useful. It can teach many concepts that students can build on if they desire to.

Heck, you're acting like the first language you learn is even important. I learnt using Visual Basic 6 and it's not like I didn't go and learn new languages by myself.

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

#127

Post by rolleiflex »

maeln wrote: post #114
rolleiflex wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The internet is lousy in Turkey Um, what? I just signed up for fiber in Istanbul, lowest plan, 25mbit, at dirt cheap $11 a month — unmetered. Meanwhile my San Francisco apartment, Comcast charges me $67 a month for a 50mbit capped one. While there is some variance in availability (just like any other country) Turkish infrastructure is generally first-world. It is for political reasons that it gets demoted into the…

I go to Turkey regularly and I always had a very good bandwidth on 4g, even in the middle of nowhere in Anatolia. The network is much, much better than here in France. I guess the geography of Turkey helps a lot there since they usually always have a good vantage point to put antenna. I don't know why people in this thread seem to think that Turkey is a poor developing country. It's not. Even with the recent politica…

I think many people here genuinely don’t have much of an understanding of what they’re talking about most of the time, and you just catch it for the things that you personally know about. Makes you think about what one misses and takes as fact based on comments because you don’t about other topics.

Also, good LTE availability is also probably because it’s easy to place towers on top of flats legislatively speaking, and due to ruthless competition between three carriers.

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

#128

Post by FpUser »

I use C++/C, Delphi, JS, Python. Also Java, C#, PHP and bunch of other but on and off basis. Here is my opinion

As a language Delphi/ObjectPascal is anything but ancient. It is kept up to date and has all the important features one would expect modern language to have sans garbage collection (well I actually consider this as advantage). It produces fast native executables without any dependencies. It compiles with such speed that one can write shell scripts in it. It has the right balance between a mountain of complex features C++ has and something like Go. Its IDE is nice as well and full featured. Both language and the IDE exist in paid version supported by commercial vendor and as an opensource project in case of Lazarus/FreePascal. Sure there are some problems but show me the language that does not have any,

In my opinion the only REAL problems with the language/tools are all political. At some point these products were suffering from bad corporate governance and on top of that Microsoft went out of its way to actively destroy market for these in North America and along the way poached all leading developers from Borland including main language architect.

To make a conclusion I think that ObjectPascal along with the implementation is a good candidate for being used in many areas as generic well thought out language along with the IDE.

As for the article: I think it is a good move on Idera's side. To call it corruption is disingenuous I think. Many corporations are using the same tactic. It is friggin business.

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

#129

Post by sitkack »

rolleiflex wrote: post #106
sitkack wrote: post #101

Idera (nee Borland) must be stoked, they potentially just created 1 million new Delphi programmers in a 2nd world country. I'd add a bullet point to the sheet. * One million Turkish kids This isn't necessarily corruption. And we have no idea what they paid. The internet is lousy in Turkey, having a stand alone system with documentation, an IDE and a great debugger will work really well in that environment. Pascal is…

> The internet is lousy in Turkey Um, what? I just signed up for fiber in Istanbul, lowest plan, 25mbit, at dirt cheap $11 a month — unmetered. Meanwhile my San Francisco apartment, Comcast charges me $67 a month for a 50mbit capped one. While there is some variance in availability (just like any other country) Turkish infrastructure is generally first-world. It is for political reasons that it gets demoted into the…

Istanbul isn't the whole country and it is a huge place. The sibling comment mentions Antalya, another large city. Both are going to have ok internet. Ergodan has done well to support the rural population where internet service is lousy. And that is only one aspect of having a self contained system.

Arguing over internet speeds when it comes to choosing a system for kids to learn programming on was by far weakest argument. I should have just removed it, as it was a straggler that was going to die anyway.

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

#130

Post by gwd »

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…

> as a hobbiest

Grammar note: "hobbyist". "-ist" is the suffix for, "A person who does this thing"; "-est" is the suffix for changing an adjective into a superlative: "Yours is hobby, his is hobbier, mine is the hobbiest."

Post reply on HN