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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

#211

Post by kdtop »

michaelt wrote: post #113
levosmetalo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The last release of Borland Turbo C was in 1988. That makes it an odd choice, considering gcc and clang are free and cross-platform. Hell, they even have a C89 mode if you'll be deep in the cold, cold ground before you recognise // style single-line comments.

Isn't this a bit like saying the last release of Ford's Model T was back in the 1930's? It is now called C++ Builder, and it is still regularly released. https://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder

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

#212

Post by dickeytk »

fierarul wrote: post #152
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…

What does it matter which programming language they learn in high school? It's not supposed to be the language you use for work. It's supposed to teach you to program. If anything it should be mandatory to learn something else. It might be the only non-work programming language they will ever learn. Cradle to grave Python / Java? Would Common Lisp / Haskell be considered a bad / good / ancient choice?

technically it does not matter. The trouble is students HATE learning something they think is a waste of time. I've found it impossible to convince them that the first language doesn't matter.

If they just learned anything they'd progress at roughly the same rate, but when their motivation is impacted it makes a bigger difference.

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

#213

Post by badsectoracula »

throwaway8941 wrote: post #58
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…

That's not how I remember it. An empty statically linked VCL GUI application used to weigh about 700 KB. Just as stupid edgy kids usually do, we were looking at other "C++ applications" a dozen KBs in size and were ranting about Delphi being so bloated and terrible. Of course, it was due to them being built on top of pure Win32 API, or being dynamically linked to a similar "bloated" runtime. It's not like we had an i…

Depends on the Delphi version. Delphi 2 (what i used and still use sometimes) creates a VCL app at around 200KB. Later versions added a bit, but i think it wasn't until after Delphi 7 that sizes ballooned.

However i have a feeling that MrGilbert refers to using the Windows API directly without VCL in which case you can create very small executables.

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

#214

Post by dickeytk »

kdtop wrote: post #211
michaelt wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last release of Borland Turbo C was in 1988. That makes it an odd choice, considering gcc and clang are free and cross-platform. Hell, they even have a C89 mode if you'll be deep in the cold, cold ground before you recognise // style single-line comments.

Isn't this a bit like saying the last release of Ford's Model T was back in the 1930's? It is now called C++ Builder, and it is still regularly released. https://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder

what a fantastic landing page. Especially that gif. All editors should have something this good.

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

#215

Post by badsectoracula »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #86
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 so…

> has a lot of anachronisms

Such as?

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

#216

Post by simonh »

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…

One of the issues is people in general don't pay for dev tools anymore, and writing documentation is laborious. Borland could pay documentation authors to write extensive help and examples because they charged money, and sold a ton of licenses. Stack Overflow is simply crowd-sourcing the same thing.

'Eventually' is likely to be a very, very long time. I doubt we'll have self-programming systems like that even in my children's lifetime. It will likely take AGI to do it. There's the classic tale of programmers back in the 90s quiting their jobs because they thought Visual Basic would let non-technical bureaucrats write their own software, so there would be no need for specialist software engineers anymore.

One of the world's top self driving car engineers reckons we might never get Level 5.

I'm not an AI denier. Eventually we will get AGI, I think it's inevitable. It's just that the time horizon is so far off it's not really worth worrying about. We don't even have a clue how to go about designing it's general operational parameters or architecture yet.

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

#217

Post by mamcx »

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…

The mistake is assuming Delphi is bad and stupid. Delphi is MUCH better than C and C++.

Miles ahead.

Pascal is what we need, but C is what we deserve. Billons of dollars wasted in it.

What it have bad is the massive mismanagement of the owners, and that translate to lack the influx of talent to it.

Note: I'm moderator in a Delphi forum and use it for years. I'm now in rust, and is great yet:

- Some of the problems that rust fix? Delphi too decades ago.

- Delphi still compile so fast. All the stupid c-based langs are turtles. Including LLVM. Is a sad joke that "I use C-/C++/rust" for performance and the compilers NOT PERFORM. Period.

- All the other currents langs on earth, all of them, still fail at build a GUI easily.

- Only recently, with Go and now rust, people rediscover the joy of easy deployment. Delphi have it decades ago.

Of curse Delphi is not perfect, and we the users know it. Sadly, in this industry worse is better and without a path to improve the lang you are at mercy of the owners. But like smalltalk, foxpro, hypercard and others, Delphi is a testament of what could be a decent lang/environment.

That the community at large still inflect itself with massive amounts of pain and billons of wasted effort with c/c++/js and still refuse to learn? Is something I will never understand.

P.D.2: If this sound like a rant? Yes. My super-duper machine is still compiling with rust and I'm frustrated, because this post remind me that this pain could be avoided...

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

#218

Post by mirekrusin »

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…

You may love or hate js but it makes great language to start with, runs in your browser and has infinite labyrinths of complexity in every direction - perfect for students to play with. Why nobody is using it to teach?

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

#219

Post by batuhanicoz »

sitkack wrote: post #129
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…

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 arg…

I've been to most parts of Turkey and I can say the Internet infra in smaller cities are actually better than the bigger ones. Especially the cellular/LTE network (I use Turkcell).

You rarely have dead zones between cities and most towns but the Internet sometimes downgrades to 3G or Edge if you're in a super rural area.

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

#220

Post by ravenstine »

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 thought Delphi was pretty much a repackaged version of Pascal.
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