171–180 of 199 posts
My dad used OS/2 for a long time :)
I loved Delphi. It was amazing. But then they ate their own future by going to the stratosphere with enterprisey tool acquisitions nobody remembers the names of any more; then they fell back down to earth, and flirted with Kylix -- Delphi for linux -- but at a time of great upheaval in the linux desktop world, and it never really took off either. Meanwhile, the former creator of Delphi had left for MS and created C#…
My impression was they had already lost the race before they went down the enterprise route. If anything it was their general failure in the market that pushed them down that route.
Another component is Oracle 9i running on Itanium HPUX. At least it works fine.
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,…
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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.
Here are a few more: fl studio, convert x to dvd, homesite, spybot search and destroy, resource hacker, innosetup, and originally mysql workbench
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…
> 1. No Garbage Collector
I somewhat disagree. Strings are refcounted which removes 90% of the potential pain. Interfaces could be used to ensure objects were freed at end of function scope. Full GC would have ruined Delphi IMHO (if you wanted GC you used VB, or Java which had downsides related to it’s GC. Delphi Apps worked great on low resource machines).
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 wel…
No offense, but that'd be like if you stopped eating your favourite vegetables because you once met an offensive vegan :-) Why would you move your ENTIRE company to a different language/development system because someone was rude at a conference? FWIW I felt out of place at conferences before, many are just an exercise in peacocking and showing off (and still, I have learnt some interesting things from some incredibl…
I had an acquaintance who bought the most recent Delphi release (he’s a long term customer), but had some troubles so he installed the free community edition as a stop gap solution. They phoned him and bolloxed him and demanded he buy another copy, extremely rudely and extremely forcefully (almost as if the person calling had KPI’s for upsells).
Unless I had a burning reason to use Delphi, I would avoid it, since I don’t like dealing with stupid businesses if I can avoid it... Don’t burn your loyal customers...
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It's about ALL profit you make, not just the profit of your delphi apps. IOW, it excludes all small businesses.
And it's very well hidden. I checked their site a couple weeks ago and I didn't see it. Besides it's funny. 5000 income - 3000 delphi license leaves... not much?
Like 1600 and you get 1 year of support. After that you pay the yearly subscription fee to stay on support (about 400 or so). If you skip a year, you are back to the "never have been a paying customer" status.
It is not cheap.
Not all bad though, I do like Delphi itself, but the customer hostile attitude of the company does leave a bad aftertaste and make me want to ditch it.
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 eve…
Which kind of information-leaks that either VR is hype noone really cares about, or that none of said committees (with attendant lumbering bureaucracy) have really noticed it yet. Wait, I just described the same thing two different ways.
But yeah, no, it would not do to have The Web℠ Platformᴳ, errrrr, "excel". :P