281–290 of 352 posts
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Define modern please. There is not a single thing about ObjectPascal language that relegates it as non-modern. Lack of new jobs - sure but that is a bit different subject.
The licensing model is straight out of the 80s.
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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 c…
> One of the world's top self driving car engineers reckons we might never get Level 5. I have some minor-level experience with self-driving car software, algorithms, etc. The majority of this is from various MOOCs I have participated in over the years, as well as research papers, books, and other things I have read and consumed. In short, I am not an expert, but I am not unfamiliar with the technology, either. I per…
From what I've seen I think your model of human behavior is flawed. Aircraft have been mostly fly-by-wire for decades and software flaws have led to some crashes (most recently those of the 737 Max), but that hasn't stopped people from flying in planes.
People have already been killed by self-driving cars, but that hasn't stopped the testing programs. Tesla automation (though far from full self-driving) has led to a number of fatal accidents yet people still buy Tesla's and I haven't heard of any public outcry to ban them from the roads.
I too am skeptical that we'll be seeing full self-driving cars anytime soon, but not for the reason you give.
I think the real issue is that AI-like technology has a 90-10 problem. It's relatively easy to get to 90% of human level performance but that last 10% is much much harder - unpredictably harder. Unfortunately self-driving cars are an area where 90% isn't good enough, even 99% isn't good enough. You probably need to get to something like 5 or 6 9's to be acceptable for broad general use and no AI-like technology has yet gotten anywhere close to that.
EDIT: I didn't mean to imply that the 737 Max is fly-by-wire, but the MCAS system that caused the crashes is a comparable technology.
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Outdated or not, you can learn an awful lot using Borland Turbo C. You can implement any data structure you like.
Sure you can learn a lot but I have no idea why you would choose Turbo C in 2020 over say a Raspberry Pi with GCC. Turbo C (discontinued in 1990) is going to expose a bunch of irrelevant things today, as even most microcontrollers are 32-bit: painful 16-bit near/far memory model a single task operating system (DOS) that has been long obsolete no support for networking or threads I could go on and on.
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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…
Sure... when general AI becomes available, flexible, and has solid usability for something like this. Which will be about the time that faster than light stardrives become common and our meals are materialized out of thin air on demand.
Despite perceptions, the last few years' "AI boom" is mostly marketing. Advances in processor power have made deep learning algorithms practical outside lab settings, but we're not even close to a "generic AI" that can think as well as even a dog can. That's decades away at the earliest.
Right now, we don't even understand how our own brains work.
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.
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.
I used Delphi for years back in the day, and will always have a soft spot for it. But your claims here are simply not true - the .NET standard library is huge, and you can get a lot done without any other packages.
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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…
I don't think SO has dumbed down people. It's just the average level has tanked because of influx of people in tech. In 1980s average computer person was highly skilled, educated and intelligent, because even to get access to even the simplest computer required a solid dedication and investment. Now, tech is ubiquitous, easily accessible, and lots of people with most different backgrounds jump in. You'd be amazed how many 'developers' fail to solve FizzBuzz test. We actually DO test applicants with it, and results are extremely appalling. I am unable to understand how a person who calls himself a developer and has experience can fail this, but I have learned to accept this as an observed phenomenon.
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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)
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The licensing model is straight out of the 80s.
How so? You mean that you can actually buy it and have permanent license instead of money being sucked from your account every month? Or get Lazarus for free and forget about pauing at all.
> Or get Lazarus for free and forget about pauing at all.
I wouldn't mind if the article was titled "Turkey preinstalls Lazarus on school computers".