Delphi gave me lots of money doing freelance stuff during the 2000s because it was so fast to build custom apps on it.
Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins
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Re: Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins
#12Delphi is dead. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Re: Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins
#13Delphi is dead. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments or shallow dismissals here.
Re: Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins
#14Reading this is a strange roller coaster of emotions. Happy to read about good old times, angry about the turn of event, and sadden about the current state. At the time I thought Delphi was ( and may be still is ) the Best-in-class and a target to beat for all other RAD and IDE. The future is going to be so much better for Desktop App development. Instead we have descended to Desktop Apps with Electron.
Not only that, the state of Web app tooling as well, juggling raw HTML/CSS/JS to fake a desktop like UI. There are low code tools for Web, but they tend to be only for enterprise pockets.
Not only that but they are mostly a lipstick on the HTML/CSS/JS complexity pig and thus do little to really simplify the job. As the thin veneer peels off one is usually forced to deal with the underlying complexity anyway.
Re: Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins
#15Delphi was my first introduction to programming with Borland Delphi 3 on a magazine coverdisc before we had the internet. At 12 years old and just getting into computers, I considered .exe applications with their lovely grey components to be so professional and unattainable that the ability to build my own was mind-blowing. A few years later, I had some of my freeware that I'd built in Delphi featured on that same magazine's coverdisc!
I eventually went down the web development route but I've recently, via Arduino, learnt C/C++, and am enjoying desktop development again. Compiling is exciting!
Re: Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins
#16Now only the name remains as a ghost... I loved so much Delphi when it was still like Delphi 5. In my opinion, GUI dev was so great and easy at that time. So much easier than today for desktop or web. For exemple, just having a reactive web app today is such a pain in the ass, when it was so easy then with component anchors and such.
I live that experience still within Java and .NET ecosystems.
How? What UI toolkits?
Re: Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins
#17Reading this is a strange roller coaster of emotions. Happy to read about good old times, angry about the turn of event, and sadden about the current state. At the time I thought Delphi was ( and may be still is ) the Best-in-class and a target to beat for all other RAD and IDE. The future is going to be so much better for Desktop App development. Instead we have descended to Desktop Apps with Electron.
As much as people like to shit on electron, I rather have an electron app than no app when it comes to cross-platform compatibility and features.
The reason why Electron is so successful is because the other UI frameworks simply don't solve the problems people have as elegantly. Doing "custom" UI elements is super easy with CSS and there are many many developers for that, while doing so with WPF or QT requires far more skill and is a lot more quirky.
Re: Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins
#18Reading this is a strange roller coaster of emotions. Happy to read about good old times, angry about the turn of event, and sadden about the current state. At the time I thought Delphi was ( and may be still is ) the Best-in-class and a target to beat for all other RAD and IDE. The future is going to be so much better for Desktop App development. Instead we have descended to Desktop Apps with Electron.
I'm a Delphi guy at heart that mostly sneers at all the web UI degeneracy from the last two decades. I do however recognize some important enhancements brought by the HTML + CSS model: enabling Internationalization, Accessibility and Display independence. I'm not sure how modern GUI frameworks do it (Qt/QML?) but these are necessities for modern first class UIs that require a lot of work to get right.
Re: Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins
#19Reading this is a strange roller coaster of emotions. Happy to read about good old times, angry about the turn of event, and sadden about the current state. At the time I thought Delphi was ( and may be still is ) the Best-in-class and a target to beat for all other RAD and IDE. The future is going to be so much better for Desktop App development. Instead we have descended to Desktop Apps with Electron.
As much as people like to shit on electron, I rather have an electron app than no app when it comes to cross-platform compatibility and features. The reason why Electron is so successful is because the other UI frameworks simply don't solve the problems people have as elegantly. Doing "custom" UI elements is super easy with CSS and there are many many developers for that, while doing so with WPF or QT requires far mo…
People don't shit on electron in general, some tech people do. We know what our computers can do when optimally programmed and there they are wasting cycles on rendering badly built web apps. I believe we should be shitting on badly written apps: we can see how a really well written very complex electron app like vscode behaves: then we install some simple crappy app that is not even in the same universe complexity wise as vscode which someone burns 100x more memory and cpu. That we should shit on imho.
Re: Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins
#20Reading this is a strange roller coaster of emotions. Happy to read about good old times, angry about the turn of event, and sadden about the current state. At the time I thought Delphi was ( and may be still is ) the Best-in-class and a target to beat for all other RAD and IDE. The future is going to be so much better for Desktop App development. Instead we have descended to Desktop Apps with Electron.
Delphi is still wildly popular especially outside of the English speaking software development world. It's a bit strange to see. The English speaking developers outside of the US are likely to be following US industry trends, but Delphi and other languages are quite entrenched in industrial programming and custom ORM designs in South America, Africa, and Eastern Europe.
Something really nice about Delphi is it compiles quickly. Very underrated. Modern Delphi has rough feature parity with Java with anonymous classes and functions, making it quite usable. Unfortunately those feature have not made it into FreePascal dialects yet.
The guy who created Delphi went on to make C#. We might see MS's open source push give us something Delphi like yet.