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Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins

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Re: Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins

#21

Post by Lammy »

> The accepted story is that the Delphi name was originally suggested by then Borland developer Danny Thorpe as a reference to the Greek fortune-telling temple of the same name. One of the goals behind Delphi was to provide database connectivity to developers, and because Oracle was one of the more popular database products of the time, the reasoning was that “if you want to talk to the Oracle, you have to go to Delphi”.

Even if it's an unintentional coincidence, Delphi is also where Apollo killed Python (which hit 1.0 in 1994) :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(mythology)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python#Version_1

Re: Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins

#22

Post by blablabla123 »

ghosty141 wrote: post #17
ksec wrote: post #7

Reading 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…

But it's also a self-sustaining cycle. Actually developing Applications with GTK is relatively straight-forward. I think UI development but esp. cross platform UI development also suffered a lot from fragmentation with both frameworks and languages. So chances finding good documentation for a chosen combination are low.

(And yes, using WPF or QT is ridiculously difficult despite having full-featured IDEs)

Re: Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins

#23

Post by pjmlp »

speed_spread wrote: post #18
ksec wrote: post #7

Reading 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.

All of those web features exist since Motif days and layout managers.

Re: Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins

#24

Post by pjmlp »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #20
ksec wrote: post #7

Reading 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 compil…

Indeed, here in Germany there is at least one Delphi conference, and additionally it tends to share some slots in .NET conferences.

Re: Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins

#26

Post by tluyben2 »

pjmlp wrote: post #25
tluyben2 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? What UI toolkits?

Windows Forms for example?

Yes, fair enough. Unfortunately that is not accepted a lot anymore; I make custom tools for embedded hardware with win forms and it's great but projects where UI designers get in... nope.

Re: Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins

#28

Post by thought_alarm »

Borland's VCL was a great achievement that brought some much needed cohesiveness and sanity to Win32 development in a way that Microsoft was never able to do. I've always found it interesting that OpenStep/Cocoa and VCL were released at about the same time in the mid-90s, as they're both so similar.

Even though I was a complete C++ snob at the time, I had to admit that working with Delphi/Pascal projects was surprisingly painless. The compile times were insanely fast.

But I preferred to use the VCL with C++. Well into the 2000s when .NET has completely taken over, I still felt that native VCL/C++ was the best solution for most Windows apps.

Re: Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins

#29

Post by jchw »

pjmlp wrote: post #23
speed_spread wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All of those web features exist since Motif days and layout managers.

Personally, DPI independence and screen reader support is definitely not something I associate with the “Motif days.”

Re: Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins

#30

Post by jchw »

thought_alarm wrote: post #28

Borland's VCL was a great achievement that brought some much needed cohesiveness and sanity to Win32 development in a way that Microsoft was never able to do. I've always found it interesting that OpenStep/Cocoa and VCL were released at about the same time in the mid-90s, as they're both so similar. Even though I was a complete C++ snob at the time, I had to admit that working with Delphi/Pascal projects was surprisi…

I wish I had been exposed to Delphi or at least the VCL earlier. After the fact, it made me feel envious compared to using MFC and whatever else shipped with Visual C++ all the time.
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