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Delphi's 25th Birthday

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Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#11

Post by ansgri »

martin_a wrote: post #4

Wow, 25 years. Wasn't onboard right from the start but something like Delphi 4 or 5 when I was in school. Ended that "career" with some cracked version of Delphi 7 Enterprise (obviously one needed the biggest version as a 16 year old!). I have good memories of Delphi, was my start into programming. Nice to see it's still around.

I've basically learned programming and database design in Delphi 7, using a couple of thick textbooks + Win32 API reference (.chm; no internet back then for us). The smoothest developer experience (build, GUI design, debug) I've ever had. Despite I had a rather mediocre PC at that time, it was snappier than anything modern, save for not-quite-IDEs like VS Code.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#12

Post by rob74 »

peter_d_sherman wrote: post #2

Excerpt: "I started my coding career using a Turbo Pascal clone for the Commodore Amiga, something called High-Speed Pascal, published by UK based company Hi-Soft." It would be interesting if an open-source version of this Amiga Turbo Pascal clone - was available somewhere...

Here's an overview of Pascal implementations for Amiga: http://fpcamigawiki.alb42.de/index.php?title=Workshop:Amiga,... (however I think when they wrote "development seized", they actually meant "ceased" ;) )

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#14

Post by pjmlp »

fortunajs wrote: post #7

annual birthday party didn’t happen though - one developer couldn’t make it due to sickness and the second one decided not to go not wanting to feel alone ;-)

At least in what concerns German community, there would be a couple more showing up.

Delphi is alive over here, even if only on corporations with big pockets.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#16

Post by moomin »

I find it ironic they describe it as “25 Years of Excellence” because, as much as people go on about the competition, what really broke Delphi was its poor quality control

I bloody loved that language, but all of the components had serious errors that resulted in crashes. To make it worse, they are their own dog food, meaning the IDE itself crashed all the time.

This wouldn’t have been so bad, but then VB5 happened, which was much, much worse semantically but absolutely rock solid.

Of course, then C# happened, but devs like me had already left the ecosystem. (And the less said about all that bundled cruft the better.)

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#17

Post by pjmlp »

altmind wrote: post #9

For those missing Delphi, have you considered VS/C#/Winforms? I gonna tell you than its binaries as portable as Delphi/Kylix(e.g. major platforms covered). The language is much less annoying (oh how i hated Type and Var sections in the times). The gui programming style can be similar or can be modernized. The designer and component library is vastly improved. Third party components are cheap compared to today's "clou…

Yes, that is my daily driver nowadays, however .NET AOT experience still misses a bit compared with Delphi.

And Delphi is still around, no need to talk as if it was dead.

In Germany, it has a regular section on the .NET developers magazine and an yearly conference.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#19

Post by nottorp »

pjmlp wrote: post #17
altmind wrote: post #9

For those missing Delphi, have you considered VS/C#/Winforms? I gonna tell you than its binaries as portable as Delphi/Kylix(e.g. major platforms covered). The language is much less annoying (oh how i hated Type and Var sections in the times). The gui programming style can be similar or can be modernized. The designer and component library is vastly improved. Third party components are cheap compared to today's "clou…

Yes, that is my daily driver nowadays, however .NET AOT experience still misses a bit compared with Delphi. And Delphi is still around, no need to talk as if it was dead. In Germany, it has a regular section on the .NET developers magazine and an yearly conference.

Does anyone do something non legacy in it?

Their pricing is a bit of a barrier to entry for new apps now.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#20

Post by m0zg »

I made my first substantial, steady paycheck with Delphi. It was pretty great for its time, and it really lowered the barrier for entry into programming, and especially GUI-based programming. I wasn't a huge fan of Pascal, so I ended up continuing to work in C++ Builder, but this stuff was _such_ a breath of fresh air back when Microsoft tooling sucked real bad, and Visual Studio was not "visual" at all. There were entire sites chock full of reusable Delphi/C++ Builder components that you could just download and easily integrate into your code. Then Borland lost Anders Hejlsberg, and Microsoft gained Anders Hejlsberg, and within a few years we saw C# (clearly inspired by Object Pascal) and Windows Forms (clearly inspired by VCL).
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