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Delphi's 25th Birthday

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Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#31

Post by martin_a »

ansgri wrote: post #11
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.

The experience was awesome! Just hit F9, if I remember correctly, and everything worked (sometimes). Export as a .exe and you were good to go.

Maybe I should get into it again, not sure. :-D

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#32

Post by bartels_media »

Congratulations!

We love making our software with Delphi since 2002 and it always provided us with a rock solid foundation until today.

In those 18 years (>2.000.000 downloads) we never had a single critical failure. Ever.

The rapid prototyping capabilities help us to design and _experience_ user interface in no time.

Firemonkey allows us to create Mac & Windows multi-plaform software from a single code base.

As a commercial software company that needs the job done reliable and efficient, Delphi just never disappointed us.

Yes, we know there is #C, .NET, Java but we see no need to change something that just works so well.

Cheers, Bartels Media from Germany

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#33

Post by dvdhsu »

gyulai wrote: post #28

I used to love Delphi in the late 90s, and if someone could do a late-90s-Delphi-like experience for programming UI-heavy software today, and do it right, and in a way that properly integrates with the anno 2020 tech landscape, then I would love to use such a thing. In a bout of late 90s nostalgia, I convinced my then-employer in 2011 to buy a license for the professional version of Delphi for a software project I wa…

Hi there! I’m working on Retool (https://retool.com), which is “Delphi in the cloud”. The goal, as you said, is to make it easier and faster to build “UI-heavy software”. If anybody has any comments or suggestions on how we could market something like this, please let me know! In david@. Thanks!

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#34

Post by dejv »

nottorp wrote: post #19
pjmlp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lots of industrial/medical/lab instruments still use Delphi for user interface and some high level control. Delphi is still quite popular, but more and more niche, in Germany, Austria and countries with manufacturing/development ties to those countries.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#35

Post by barrkel »

weavie wrote: post #30
altmind wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still remember interbase, now called firebird. Of course, sqlite is much more prominent today for an embeded database, but for the times without sqlite...

Interbase was a proper client server db. If you wanted embedded you needed Paradox. Ah, I have many happy memories of pulling all nighters repairing corrupted Paradox files...

No, you can (dynamically) link Interbase into your app, so the server runs in-process. You can also do it with Firebird: https://www.firebirdsql.org/pdfmanual/html/ufb-cs-embedded.h...

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#36

Post by mhd »

TsomArp wrote: post #27
mhd wrote: post #25

Delphi was great for developing custom solutions for middle class companies. Not end-user stuff, but no enterprise either. That kind of software vanishing coincides with that whole business sector getting smaller. From a technical perspective, it was my favorite attempt to tame a often horrible mess of half-baked database design and ad-hoc solutions -- you can do spaghetti code in every language, but the Delphi apps…

I don't see your point. Skype was done in Delphi, and it was pretty much end-user and very successful. There are many other apps: Skype, Nero Burning Rom, WinRAR, Partition Magic, Panda Titanium Antivirus, TuneUp Utilities, Aida64, BeyondCompare, Total Commander, CloneDVD, Ultra ISO, KMplayer, Gold Wave, Sound editor. And I am sure there are many others.

I meant that software for mid-sized companies isn't end-user programming, but not enterprise development either and that Delphi was pretty great for that. Often single developer, often embedded database.

Didn't want to imply that Delphi wasn't/wouldn't be great for the other ends of the spectrum, too.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#37

Post by Yuioup »

OK,

At the time of the Delphi 8 release I went to a Delphi conference to get to know the community better. This was 2003 or so? I was evaluating whether or not to get more licenses for our company so we could put extra effort into developing Delphi for .NET.

Let's just say that I found the people there to be rude and insulting. Not just the people at the conference there but also by some of Borland staff there as well. A joke was played on me which I won't get into here but I didn't - and don't - appreciate being bullied.

Let's just say that the next day I abandoned Delphi and moved our entire company to Visual Studio and never looked back.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#38

Post by aaronheid »

dvdhsu wrote: post #33
gyulai wrote: post #28

I used to love Delphi in the late 90s, and if someone could do a late-90s-Delphi-like experience for programming UI-heavy software today, and do it right, and in a way that properly integrates with the anno 2020 tech landscape, then I would love to use such a thing. In a bout of late 90s nostalgia, I convinced my then-employer in 2011 to buy a license for the professional version of Delphi for a software project I wa…

Hi there! I’m working on Retool ( https://retool.com ), which is “Delphi in the cloud”. The goal, as you said, is to make it easier and faster to build “UI-heavy software”. If anybody has any comments or suggestions on how we could market something like this, please let me know! In david@. Thanks!

Looks promising, Amazon MWS API would be great to have

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#39

Post by gyulai »

dvdhsu wrote: post #33
gyulai wrote: post #28

I used to love Delphi in the late 90s, and if someone could do a late-90s-Delphi-like experience for programming UI-heavy software today, and do it right, and in a way that properly integrates with the anno 2020 tech landscape, then I would love to use such a thing. In a bout of late 90s nostalgia, I convinced my then-employer in 2011 to buy a license for the professional version of Delphi for a software project I wa…

Hi there! I’m working on Retool ( https://retool.com ), which is “Delphi in the cloud”. The goal, as you said, is to make it easier and faster to build “UI-heavy software”. If anybody has any comments or suggestions on how we could market something like this, please let me know! In david@. Thanks!

Not sure exactly where your product lands in a continuum between where Delphi was in the late 90s and where Microsoft Access was in the late 90s with its ability to create forms on top of databases, or maybe Oracle Forms. Delphi was the more heavy-duty option for cases that involved a more substantial investment in coding-up actual logic.

Now when I think "substantial investment" and then look at your website, what comes to mind is "lock-in nightmare". Sorry, not trying to be cruel, just wanting to give you an honest opinion.

I mean: Picture a development team pouring real efforts into development work, then training end-users to use the final product. That represents a real investment. And that investment is then locked into a vendor, where it's unclear what will happen to that investment if the vendor should decide to change the pricing model or go out of business.

I guess the original Delphi did have that problem, but the world was just a different one in the late 90s. You bought your copy of Delphi on a CD with a perpetual license, and an organization that had lock-in to Windows NT software would see it as a perfectly viable path, to keep those Windows NT systems running for the next 20 years to recoup any investment in software. Plus Microsoft was actually pretty good (and continues to be good) at establishing backwards-compatibility.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#40

Post by pritambarhate »

Do you guys think that closed source general-purpose programming languages have any future? In the late 90s and early 2000s both Java and C# were closed source. Still, they became highly successful. Today many people wouldn't even touch a language or a framework to build a business on unless it's Open Source. It's surprising how the programming landscape has changed in the past 20 years.
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