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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

#201

Post by oefrha »

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…

Python just installs with a double-click and you can write code in a box (IDLE) and it runs. That’s not a high bar to clear, really.

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

#202

Post by badsectoracula »

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…

> trying to apply the ancient tools

Delphi isn't ancient, if anything chances are some of the tools people use nowadays on Linux are older than Delphi.

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

#204

Post by Aperocky »

Wiretrip wrote: post #124
blub wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or html canvas and js.

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

#205

Post by vintagedave »

mbreese wrote: post #181
mrweasel wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason I could see, based on teaching teenagers programming. They want to build GUI applications and Delphi allows that very easily. Sure C# and Visual Studio makes more sense and they could get everything for free, but maybe Turkey doesn't like/trust Microsoft.

When I was in undergrad taking Data Structures and Algorithms, the course was in C (or C++, I don't remember). But by that time I had already started programming GUIs in Windows (MFC days). It was actually really nice to wire up the base classes and operations for a data structure (push/pop/etc...) and then be able to see the operations working with a GUI. At the time, it was really cool to be able to click a "pop" b…

I agree the impact of writing code and seeing something onscreen is very important.

> I had already started programming GUIs in Windows (MFC days)

MFC and Delphi's UI model are completely incomparable. One is statically built, often in code, inflexible, hard to iterate, hard to use custom controls... and one is modern OO, buildable visually (streamed to text, so editable in text), incredibly flexible, very fast to modify, and with thousands of custom controls.

And these days it builds for macOS, mobile (iOS and Android), and Linux too. So it's a decent choice.

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

#206

Post by vintagedave »

pbourke wrote: post #177
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…

> It has pretty low entry barriers Cost being the obvious large one. Every time I’ve had an inkling of interest in Delphi, I pop by the website and nope out within a few minutes after finding the pricing page.

There's a free Community edition, which you can use as a hobbyist, or as a company until you reach a revenue limit.

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter

For the commercial versions, AFAIK overall it's less than Visual Studio, but when amortized over a couple of years. Slightly different pricing model so trickier to compare.

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

#207

Post by badsectoracula »

Dolores12 wrote: post #43
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…

All modern tools are really complicated compared to Delphi. I remember Delphi was so intuitive to design GUI and program its events so i could start making my own programs right after professor showed me how to make a button and handle onClick event.

Lazarus is pretty much a free and open source Delphi (yes there are differences but they do not matter much) and really not any different in terms of difficulty compared to it.

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

You can see it in action under Linux here where i make a simple puzzle game:

https://youtu.be/s_01Xhd2EJM?t=692

(if the time stamp doesn't work, skip to 11:32, the previous ~11 minutes are me downloading, compiling it and configuring it - not 100% necessary on Linux and on Windows i never do that as the installer is a classic wizard-based one, but as i write on the video, i prefer to compile it when using it on Linux - also note that on Windows you do not need to install FPC as it comes bundled with Lazarus, it is really just running the installer, double clicking the desktop icon and you're ready)

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

#208

Post by kdtop »

vintagedave wrote: post #198
perfunctory wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 all they know. A little bit too harsh. As the article points out Delphi is currently #12 on the TIOBE Index [0]. Above Go for example. [0] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Absolutely too harsh. Remember Pascal was designed to be a learning and teaching language - this purpose is what it was made for . And Delphi itself was a standout leader in technology, a huge inspiration for C#, and still a key technology used by many people today. It's just not well known. Not well known != ancient.

As I recall, c# was developed by one of the primary designers of object pascal, Anders Jejlsberg, after being poached away by Microsoft. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg)

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

#209

Post by badsectoracula »

Wiretrip wrote: post #123
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.

Last time i checked recent versions of Delphi have DRM that need internet connection. I even remember someone from the official newsgroups saying that he had to install a crack so that they can use it on foot in their laptop when they had no internet connection.

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

#210

Post by turkthrower123 »

I wonder how much Delphi/Idera bribed the head of the Ministry of Industry and Technology for this boondoggle. Allahallah, and they wonder why 10% of our country is illiterate. Every single decision by the government is made from the perspective of "how can I make a lira off of this"

MIIT chief Faruk Özlü just bought himself a new mansion in Mugla over the summer. Just saying.

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