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Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

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141–150 of 352 posts

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

#141

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…

Is that somehow wrong? What was so fundamentally changed in CS that makes teaching C obsolete?

[deleted]

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

#142
post #104
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.

There are Python bindings for Qt.

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

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

I am right here, this behavior is rude. I never attacked you personally, I was expressing an opinion about internet speeds in a country I traveled across for 6 weeks. I am not trying to be an expert or a know it all. Out of the whole original post, the trivia about internet speed in Turkey is the thing you choose to engage on. HN is for the most part toxic. And probably a waste of time.

I’m sorry if that sounded rude, it wasn’t meant to be. Ultimately though, you’re using the argument to paint an incorrect picture and then operate within that picture to make further claims. If you think it was a weak point, or not relevant within the context, it’s generally best to keep it out. I do pretty heavy cleanup after I write comments myself to not look like I’m implying something that I’m actually not.

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

#144

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.

> Rust [...] everything is web-based

Correction: Rust's help and documentation is HTML-based, and getting a local, automatically updated copy is trivial.

> even "local" docs launch in a web browser

Uh, so what? Can you name a better format for programming language documentation that's also ubiquitously supported?

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

#145
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would you want to build a restaurant accounting/billing app as a desktop app instead of a browser app?

Because that's what the jobs that are hiring are for in the place the GP lives? I mean, I'd rather browse HN than do work all day, but nobody's going to pay me for that.

I was an early web developer who transitioned into a modern one as time passed but I've moved back to desktop application development as of late because that's what was hiring in my area at the time I was looking for a job and I simply am not married to a particular technology.

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

#146
post #118
post #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 dama…

Java and C# are a morass of complexity. There is no job or project where you just use the language Java/C#, you have to pull their immense libraries and frameworks in too. On the other hand Delphi's just Delphi. That's quite refreshing in a world where everything depends on everything else.

> There is no job or project where you just use the language Java/C#, you have to pull their immense libraries and frameworks in too.

Why do you think this? I regularly write plain Java code, or code using just a couple of simple libraries.

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

#147

Students will be taught a language they'll never ever use in real life. It was paid for although there're tons of free languages for every platform and every paradigm. I guess someone from the government had just become significantly richer.

If the government bought into Delphi then dev jobs within the country will likely be in Delphi more and more as time goes on. They don't need to do what we're doing. There's more than one way to skin a cat.

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

#148
post #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 dama…

The move from Pascal to Java made a transition from learning how to program a computer to learning how to build apps using java-like OOP and libraries. Most places where Java is taught don´t teach about computer registers, stack frames, pointers, memory management, etc, and how they work together. Or if they do it they do it superficially.

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

#150

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.

Even though the Rust docs aren't built for this purpose first, in IntelliJ or CLion I can still press Ctrl + Q on a method and see the full method documentation with examples. I think what IntelliJ does is simply parse the doc comment for that method and then render the markdown contained in it in the little popup. The standard docs are built from those comments as well.
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