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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

#231

Post by kdtop »

Eternal truths:

* New things are typically more popular than older things.

* People not using ObjectPascal / Delphi love to hate on it.

* People using it feel outraged at the injustice, pointing out it's merits.

I have been using Delphi for about 30 yrs it seems. I have a love / hate relationship with it. Love the language and the ability to rapidly get the program I want created. Hate that version after version, the IDE STILL has stupid bugs; that the built-in help seems to get worse and worse with time (I don't want a slow web browser showing me Microsoft C calls and all sorts of irrelevant nonsense), and get very annoyed when having to get required custom components installed before being able to open a project using the components. And I REALLY dislike that they charge so bloody much for it. For business reasons I had to purchase a license that cost a few thousand dollars. Like 2 weeks later, sales people were calling me encouraging me to spend a similar amount to upgrade to the newest version that had just come out. They must have only a handful of paying customers and depend on the few to keep their entire business afloat.

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

#232

Post by badsectoracula »

non-entity wrote: post #70
revanx_ wrote: post #30

I programmed in Delphi for 8 years, then I switched to FreePascal. Yes, the grass is greener on the other side, and it's also free.

Going to start a project in in FreePascal soon because it seems to be the only [not abandonware] compiler for a high level language that still supports targeting 8086.

FWIW OpenWatcom v2 (a fork by one of the original developers who, at least according to the perforce logs, was the most active pre-fork anyway) https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2 should also support 8086.

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

#233

Post by badsectoracula »

oefrha wrote: 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…

He most likely means manual memory management. Almost everything else from C# and Java you can find on Delphi.

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

#234

Post by badsectoracula »

marcosdumay wrote: post #71
oefrha wrote: 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…

Sounds like he doesn't want his students to get lost on OOP concepts.

Delphi/VCL is heavily OOP though.

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

#235

Post by sequence7 »

kdtop wrote: post #208
vintagedave wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 )

Yes and Anders Hejlsberg was also the chief architect of Delphi.

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

#236

Post by badsectoracula »

tluyben2 wrote: post #52
Leace wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that but Delphi has tremendous educational potential due to fast feedback loops. There was a blog post once on HN where one of Delphi authors discussed how they designed IDE and the language to be friendly for newcomers. One could ask why not invest in https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ instead of commercial Delphi though?

I try Lazarus every year; it is still instable. Did it improve over the past year?

In what OS and with what projects are you trying it? I'm using Lazarus since 2006 or so and the last time i remember it being unstable was back in 2008-2009. It has been a very long time since i even saw the IDE crashing, let alone getting a feeling that it is unstable.

(note that i'm using Windows and mainly with my own projects and components and i only use the components that come with Lazarus)

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

#237

Post by non-entity »

my123 wrote: post #226
non-entity wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to start a project in in FreePascal soon because it seems to be the only [not abandonware] compiler for a high level language that still supports targeting 8086.

GCC is a good choice too for those still. Also, you can get a version with support even from Mentor at https://www.mentor.com/embedded-software/sourcery-tools/sour... Look at the: > These releases provide cutting edge support for 8088, 8086, 80186 and 80286 processors from the year 1984. section.

Oh I did find this one, albeit I couldnt find much information regarding ot outside of a short reddit thread. Sadly it looks like support expires this year (although I'm sure it will still be stable enough to use in most cases)

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

#238

Post by badsectoracula »

nottorp wrote: post #33
gaspoweredcat wrote: post #5

i have no idea why delphi still seems so popular in the middle east, a large number of mobile phone tools are still coded in delphi but ive never really understood why

Before everything came with an UI builder, there was only Visual Basic (before dot niet) and Delphi for building UIs quickly. But with VB you needed to switch to C++ for low level functionality, while with Delphi you could just do it in the same project. Including inline assembly. Those days are gone, but the legacy still remains. For this deal though, I guess Embarcadero is desperately looking for something that loo…

> Sheesh, cheapest Delphi license is 1699 eur... back before Borland (sorry, Inprise) got sold i think it started at 300...

The cheapest version actually started at $99 and that was up to Delphi 5 IIRC. Later versions bumped the price to $199 (and i think there was a $99 for non-commercial use) and then quickly ascended to thousands.

I think it was after Delphi 5 that they also renamed themselves to Inprise.

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

#239

Post by badsectoracula »

zozbot234 wrote: post #133
FpUser wrote: post #128

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 su…

> has all the important features one would expect modern language to have sans garbage collection No RAII or ownership tracking, no borrowck, no support for concurrency free of data races. Huge deal breaker.

I know you are trolling, but just in case, you can implement RAII using record management operators:

https://wiki.freepascal.org/management_operators

These are not in Free Pascal 3.0.6 (used in the latest Lazarus release) but they are in trunk and will be available in Free Pascal 3.2. I think they are also available in Delphi since a while now.

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

#240

Post by mamcx »

theamk wrote: post #224
mamcx wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I fondly remember using Delphi to create native Windows GUIs. It was really great for this. The reason I stopped using it was that I discovered that there are many more program types than Windows GUIs - and there, C++ (or sometimes C) is really the best. High performance lock-free lists? Support for obscure network protocols? Containers with custom allocators? Delphi does not really work there.

That is an effect of ecosystem, not language.

Is interesting to note that you can see "High performance lock-free lists" in many langs, but near none have good GUIs builders. Good GUIs builders are harder, and your "High performance lock-free lists" is easy, also you can use C/C++ libraries in Delphi too...

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