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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

#301

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…

>Delphi just installs with a double-click and you can write code in a box and it runs. You can do that at https://www.onlinegdb.com/online_c_compiler , but do programmers use that website for professional programming? No, because professional programming is about integration into a system/platform, not about one-size-fits-all sandboxed environments.

That's great...but this is aimed at youth and not professional programmers. Ease of use is a major factor

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

#302
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well why not? I've used Delphi for years and also Java/JavaFX/Swing. There's not much reason to use Delphi anymore when Java IDEs can do the same things, and much more, and with docs that are just as good or better, all for free.

In Delphi I do desktop applications that perform real time low level device control, talk over USB and some specialized radio gizmos, DirectX graphics and multimedia processing, real time data presentation, bulk data processing, game like communications over UDP etc. etc. All at the same time from a different threads. Good luck doing it in Java. I did try doing low level stuff with it per client request and it felt l…

The only thing that you seem to be right about is the low level device control stuff. Everything else is pretty much already easy enough to do in Java. The language was designed with multithreading in mind.

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

#303
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> What was so fundamentally changed in CS that makes teaching C obsolete? It's not C that's obsolete, it's MS-DOS and the 16-bit segmented memory model it uses.

Totally agree. I've been making the same argument elsewhere on this thread. People are disagreeing with saying things were simpler back then. I don't know how anyone can have fond memories of a 16-bit CPU with segments or bank switching compared to a modern flat model and think it was simpler.

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

#304
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone who learned in the Turbo Pascal / Turbo C era, StackOverflow has moved the state of the art on hugely , and people's dependency on it is more a symptom of the environements they are working in than anything else. > Progress is neither linear, increasing nor assured, and much is lost, reinvented not necessarily as well and lost again. The big difference is that we are now networked. The target MSDO…

> browser > zero-friction environment Giggle.

If you know another way I can deploy code instantly on everything from PCs to phones to televisions without even having to sign anything, pay anything, or get approval, I'm all ears.

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

#305
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.

Delphi can show the assembly code generated for every line.

That is important to actually learn how the computer works

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

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the problem with it? Programming snob? Isn't it still C programming after all? I don't understand the problem with people bashing Borland after all these years! Didn't you know that the accomplished Mr Anders Hejlsberg was behind Borland (TurboPascal and Delphi), before he was appointed to develop Microsoft C# and Typescript? So, what's the/your problem!?

I'm thinking of a graduate turning up for a modern programming position and opining: > I know Delphi! I would argue you can made good courses in any language and it would seem more convenient to teach in something that has better transferrability into industry. Also the response is likely aggravated by this quote from the source article: > a curriculum that has taken heavy damage from the adoption of Java and C# in t…

I have spent like ten years developing software in Delphi, and another ten years with FreePascal, but never managed to get an industry job :/

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

#307
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What was so fundamentally changed in CS that makes teaching C obsolete? It's not C that's obsolete, it's MS-DOS and the 16-bit segmented memory model it uses.

Totally agree. I've been making the same argument elsewhere on this thread. People are disagreeing with saying things were simpler back then. I don't know how anyone can have fond memories of a 16-bit CPU with segments or bank switching compared to a modern flat model and think it was simpler.

> I don't know how anyone can have fond memories of a 16-bit CPU with segments or bank switching compared to a modern flat model and think it was simpler.

"Fond memories" is easy to explain if that's what you grew up with. As for simpler, let me play devil's advocate for a bit: our "modern flat model" looks simple until you find out it's not really "flat". The 8086 model is basically "(segment << 4) + offset", while the "modern flat model" is actually a multi-level table lookup.

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

#308
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. I've been making the same argument elsewhere on this thread. People are disagreeing with saying things were simpler back then. I don't know how anyone can have fond memories of a 16-bit CPU with segments or bank switching compared to a modern flat model and think it was simpler.

> I don't know how anyone can have fond memories of a 16-bit CPU with segments or bank switching compared to a modern flat model and think it was simpler. "Fond memories" is easy to explain if that's what you grew up with. As for simpler, let me play devil's advocate for a bit: our "modern flat model" looks simple until you find out it's not really "flat". The 8086 model is basically "(segment << 4) + offset", while…

Yeah I guess that explains the fond memories part.

Some 32-bit parts are totally flat. Like low-end ARM parts with SRAM and no MMU. Compare that to a 8-bit or 16-bit PIC microcontroller where you need to bank switch to have a usable amount of memory for your application and its heaven.

But yeah, I see what you are saying. Still, pulling the wool over someone's eyes doesn't seem so bad to me about virtual->physical memory and TLBs as it does making them jump through a distinction between pointer types, but maybe I am in the minority on that.

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

#309
post #267
post #216

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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…

The way I see it, we will have the manufacturers of the cars to take the blame and to ask for compensation. They will probably take out insurance for each car they sell to pay out any of these claims with the premium that depends on the accident rate, added to the price of the car. This would be better even if the accident rate is the same as the current human one. I think we would see self-driving cars of limited capability become commonplace in the near future because of the extra safety it offers us especially from blame if an accident does occur. Also, the complexity of developing self-driving systems is because we are trying to adapt them to current-day roads if we make changes to the roads by adding lanes, stationary sensors to help self-driving cars we could make accidents are very rare.

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

#310
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Delphi I do desktop applications that perform real time low level device control, talk over USB and some specialized radio gizmos, DirectX graphics and multimedia processing, real time data presentation, bulk data processing, game like communications over UDP etc. etc. All at the same time from a different threads. Good luck doing it in Java. I did try doing low level stuff with it per client request and it felt l…

The only thing that you seem to be right about is the low level device control stuff. Everything else is pretty much already easy enough to do in Java. The language was designed with multithreading in mind.

"...multithreading in mind..." - Easy and efficiency are 2 different things. Java synchronization primitives and it's ability to flip bits incur heavy performance penalty when compared to native ones. You might not care about it but I do.

You are also free to point me to a good DirectX framework in Java and/or the one that let's you write Directshow and Media Foundation filters and graphs as well.

Besides your logic reads like this: since language A does the same as language B and you happen to like language A then nobody needs B. Sorry but it works both ways.

When I was doing enterprise stuff Java provided more value to me in that particular situation. Windows desktop: sorry I'll choose Delphi any time.

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