71–80 of 199 posts
Happy Birthday Delphi! If Borland's management hadn't messed up, .NET and Java probably would never had taken off on PC world.
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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...
Firebird is still actively developed as open source software: http://firebirdsql.org/
There's been more and more talk about moving to something else, but a complete rewrite would likely be a death sentence so...
Still, for whipping up some quick GUI that does file IO and/or DB stuff there's not much that beats it. Though having to consume REST APIs or similar newfangled things is not such a pleasurable experience.
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 e…
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Does anyone do something non legacy in it? Their pricing is a bit of a barrier to entry for new apps now.
Their pricing is quite competitive for companies that buy Oracle, SAP, DB2, Qt, SQL Server, MSDN Enterprise.... kind of licenses. That was Borland's mistake with their Inprise change, to abandon grassroots developers and focus on this kind of companies. This was last year's conference, https://entwickler-konferenz.de/program-en/ Anyone using this hardware, is running Delphi on their network. https://www.lab-services.…
Basically losing the entire market where devs are allowed to choose their platform, because they won't be aware of it.
I suppose wining and dining the executives puts food on the table too.
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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.
And neither of those (cx/winrt) produced standalone native executables.
In fact, the Office team is probably the biggest consumer of C++/Winrt.
Happy Birthday Delphi! If Borland's management hadn't messed up, .NET and Java probably would never had taken off on PC world.
I'm sure there was management issues in the 90's. But I'm of the opinion Borland's fate had a lot to do with Microsoft's embrace, extend, and extinguish strategies of the era.
Most university students in Portugal during the 90's would also gladly accept Microsoft job offers.
I always find ironic that the companies that sold out to Microsoft are always the victims, the poor souls never did anything wrong.
In case you still want to work with it : https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
Actually, if one wants to try out Delphi, https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter Lazarus and FreePascal are great, but they aren't 100% Delphi.
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> 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.
If we take "rapid application development" out of its trademarked context, applying just its common-sense meaning, and applying it to the year 2020, then the modern tech ecosystem that one would want to integrate with is clearly not C++, but rather maybe JavaScript & the browser ecosystem, Python, and low-overhead JVM langauges like Scala or Groovy.
The next thing that immediately jumps out at me is that the form designer is still using pixel-based positioning, instead of layout managers and units of length that we know from html, like em (fontsize-based), or vh/vw (percent of view-height/view-width), etc.
I was trying to research these things more extensively just now, but giving you my name, street address, company, phone number, and then "Error: Field required: Yes, I would like to receive marketing communications" for downloading the COMMUNITY edition? Come on! Enterprise bloat: Check.