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Delphi's 25th Birthday

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Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#61

Post by vintagedave »

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…

> I sincerely hope that someone will get it back on the right track (or has already done so ...

2020 Delphi supports five platforms, has 64-bit compilers everywhere, has modern language features, interoperates with C++ through C++Builder, and more. In the past few years especially, we've* seen both a lot of work on it, and increasing interest in using it.

It's modern, and used more widely than one might realise.

* "We've": This is a personal HN account but I work on Delphi and C++Builder.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#62

Post by zerr »

pjmlp wrote: post #14
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.

It was (is?) also popular in eastern Europe, especially considering a relaxed attitude towards copyright laws - even gov and public schools used to run (still run?) illegal copies :)

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#63

Post by sharken »

From a developer viewpoint i can name three things that have stopped Delphi from competing with languages such as C# and JAVA.

1. No Garbage Collector. While some understanding of object lifetime is required, the constant need to manage allocation and de-allocation of objects takes a lot of energy away from the writing code.

2. Naming variables in a separate Var block. This is really cumbersome and detracts from the development experience. This was somewhat fixed in Delphi 10.3 which was released in 2018 or rather 23 years after the first Delphi version.

3. The unrealistic pricing of Delphi. The high cost of licensing has throughout the times meant that other programming languages have been chosen on this fact alone.

If (1) and (3) could be fixed then Delphi might stand a chance to gain significant market share.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#64

Post by praptak »

The GUI builder was great, the build times were great, the debugger was great.

What was not great was Pascal, especially their version of it. It didn't even have a published formal grammar (as of Delphi 5), as I found out when trying to write some simple tooling for our codebase.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#65

Post by pjmlp »

pritambarhate wrote: post #40

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.

Yes they do.

C, C++, Ada, Pascal, Basic, Oberon compilers for embedded market, in many cases, certificed compilers.

Commercial UNIX, mainframe and Windows compilers (VS Community doesn't cover everything) are still a separate product.

Sony, Nintendo, MS SDKs for their game consoles.

HPC compilers, yeah you can try with clang and gcc, but if you are doing top research, then IBM, Intel, CodePlay, PGI compilers is what you want to be using on that hardware, and they cost pennies versus the total hardware cost.

And even in what concerns Apple, I would consider that XCode is somehow included in Apple^s hardware price.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#66

Post by bnastic »

vintagedave wrote: post #57
imagine99 wrote: post #47

A while ago I got to do some consulting/auditing for a couple of companies in the medical field, and looking under the hood of their infrastructure, I was surprised to see that two of their most important apps for daily use (one a scheduling/filing/CRM behemoth, one a 3D analysis program) are developed in Delphi. You couldn't tell it from the GUI but in one program directory I saw a VERY familiar ico on an exe and my…

> I downloaded the free Delphi Community Edition - which is GREAT - and knocked out a beautiful little client-server app for a PoC over a weekend. Could hardly fathom the adrenaline rush I got from that... I'm one of the product managers who works on Delphi today (together with Marco Cantù. I actually work on C++Builder, Delphi's sister product.) I am really happy to hear that. Your question about Sencha: we recommen…

Ah, C++ Builder... Borland wasn't afraid to patch the language (hello closures!) to get the features they needed. I loved that IDE, it made me a decent amount of money back in the day and it was ridiculously easy to get a full featured desktop application up and running, sprinkled with some Paradox on top it could do a lot! I will have to give it another look today, if nothing else then just to check who's aged better - the tool or the programmer

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#67

Post by pjmlp »

zerr wrote: post #59

Lets also don't forget C++Builder :)

Yes, still unbeaten in what concerns C++ RAD development.

For a short while C++/CX seemed to be finally it, but C++/Winrt has regressed the experience.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#68

Post by xinyiman »

I learned object pascal (Delphi) in school in high school (now 18 years ago) and it was love at first sight. Coming from ansi c and ansi c ++, the lack of the garbage collector has never been a problem. But then the license costs stopped me as well as the fact that I am a supporter of the open source world. A few years later I discovered lazarus and the free pascal and I must say that since then I have never abandoned them (now 12 years in which I program for linux / windows and for a few years also for mac os and raspberry all for free). If the delphi had lowered the licensing costs and made the product open source in its time it would have killed the market, but it was not so.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#69

Post by skeletal88 »

One small language feature I liked about Delphi was class properties.

I used Delphi at my first job, while studying in the university, where we were taught Java (and C and other languages), what I really disliked were Java's getters and setters, which seemed like a clunky and pointless verbosity, compared to the properties in Delphi.

Python has the @property decorator, I wish other languages had something like that. Qt also has foo() and setFoo(), instead of getFoo(), which makes sense, and reduces verbosity and visual clutter.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#70

Post by gyulai »

vintagedave wrote: post #61
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…

> I sincerely hope that someone will get it back on the right track (or has already done so ... 2020 Delphi supports five platforms, has 64-bit compilers everywhere, has modern language features, interoperates with C++ through C++Builder, and more. In the past few years especially, we've* seen both a lot of work on it, and increasing interest in using it. It's modern, and used more widely than one might realise. * "W…

Thanks for chiming in! I'll give it another spin, if I get some time.
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