Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Delphi's 25th Birthday

community.idera.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 199 posts

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#121

Post by pjmlp »

mobilio wrote: post #88
stockerta wrote: post #85

I programmed a lot 20 years ago as a hobby. I started at 13 with TP7 and some pascal books borrowed from my older brother. Later I "got" Delphi 1 and 3. Crated some smallish programs for myself, like a magic card db program when I started to play mtg. Fun times.

I start with TP 5.0 or 5.5.

Same here, my introduction to OOP was preparing an high school class presentation about Turbo Pascal 5.5 new OOP features.

I ought to Pascal being introduced to systems programming and OOP in a much saner way than other alternatives.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#122

Post by tenant »

lmz wrote: post #98
tenant wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS Visual Basic had windows forms as long as Delphi if not longer and long long before .net came along.

I think that was referring to "Windows Forms" the .NET library, not Windows forms in general.

OK but I've used vb6, vb.net, Delphi (and Lazarus) and they are all pretty much identical in terms of dropping in controls onto a form, writing event handler code and setting properties. So to claim that delphi's vcl is clearly the inspiration for this in .net is a bit of a stretch.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#123

Post by zerr »

pjmlp wrote: post #77
zerr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And neither of those (cx/winrt) produced standalone native executables.

Sure they do, perfectly binary only x86, x64 and ARM executables. In fact, the Office team is probably the biggest consumer of C++/Winrt.

Sorry, mixed with C++/CLI (which needed .NET Framework). As for WinRT - I wouldn't pick anything that doesn't support the second most popular desktop OS - Win7.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#124

Post by danmg »

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…

Wasn't this the idea behind WinForms and VS.NET? I even think some of the original Delphi people worked on it.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#126

Post by thu2111 »

gyulai wrote: post #39
dvdhsu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

That applies to any platform though. It being open source doesn't mean it won't be abandoned or become poorly maintained. Look at the massive churn web frameworks have seen.

Cloud tooling definitely has the problem that vendor financial troubles = a sudden "our incredible journey" and poof, your app is gone. That's something client side apps don't have to worry about.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#127

Post by thu2111 »

TsomArp wrote: post #29
moomin wrote: post #16

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,…

Never had the problems you mention till Delphi 7.

Delphi was pretty notorious for having some sort of tick/tock quality problem, for unclear reasons. Presumably some kind of botched project management inside Borland.

Delphi 1 was a mess. Delphi 2 was rock solid. Delphi 3 was a buggy mess. Delphi 4 kind of recovered things but was never as good as Delphi 2. By this point we'd figured out the pattern and skipped Delphi 5, if I recall correctly.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#128

Post by thu2111 »

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.

.NET only became open very recently, it's been quite successful. The entire iOS/Apple developer ecosystem is closed source of course. Maybe Swift isn't but nobody uses it outside the Apple platform.

You could argue Microsoft is an exception and them opening .NET shows the end of that era though.

The "open source or nothing" mentality might change in future. It means there's not much market for developer tools, so everything gets hacked together out of random "frameworks" found on GitHub that are here today, gone tomorrow when the bored developer at Netflix or Google gets their desired promo and moves on. There's no real planning or design, just whatever random stuff tech firms throw in the mix as a side effect of other projects, which is why HTML has virtual reality support but no table or spreadsheet view worth a damn.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#129

Post by pjmlp »

zerr wrote: post #123
pjmlp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they do, perfectly binary only x86, x64 and ARM executables. In fact, the Office team is probably the biggest consumer of C++/Winrt.

Sorry, mixed with C++/CLI (which needed .NET Framework). As for WinRT - I wouldn't pick anything that doesn't support the second most popular desktop OS - Win7.

Fair enough, a problem that Microsoft keeps fighting to this day, for whatever reason C++/CX means managed code.

Windows 7 is dead, it is the new XP, time to move on.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#130

Post by haunter »

wiz21c wrote: post #5

In case you still want to work with it : https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

What's the difference between this and https://www.getlazarus.org/?

Ok I kinda find out.

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ is made by the Free Pascal team, that's the "official" version. It has precompiled binaries to download https://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?page=about

https://www.getlazarus.org/ is a different version (but not sure by how much), using download scripts https://www.getlazarus.org/about/

Post reply on HN