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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

#41

Post by branko_d »

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…

Anders Hejlsberg is a world treasure as far as I'm concerned.

After basically single-handedly creating Torbo Pascal, he was the architect of Delphi, C# and now TypeScript. I don't think that anybody touched the lives of so many programmers quite like he did.

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

#42

Post by vijayrudraraju »

My father worked on Dbase, Turbo Pascal, Delphi... I remember going to his office in Scotts Valley growing up and playing around with Delphi when I was in elementary school. I think it was technically the first thing I ever programmed with - I made a calculator app (how creative right?).

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

#43

Post by whartung »

I'll never forget this Delphi anecdote. It can be applied to other tools, no doubt, but we were using Delphi at the time.

Simply, we had a junior guy doing some work, and he wrote a Client/Server GUI using Delphi talking to SQL Server (I think, not germane).

Anyway, it was all done, shipped off the client, everyone essentially happy.

I asked him how the project went.

Paraphrasing he said, "The project went really well, I didn't have many problems. But I do have one question."

"What is it?"

"Can you explain the difference between Disk and RAM?"

"..."

A testament to Delphi is that someone can be productive in computer programming without understanding something fundamental like RAM and Disk.

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

#44

Post by 7thaccount »

jcelerier wrote: post #35
tluyben2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> we can see how a really well written very complex electron app like vscode behaves yes, very much worse than the average Qt app in my experience in terms of responsivity, load time and general UI performance

Agreed. I always shudder when colleagues recommend it. Last I checked it took up an enormous amount of resources for an editor.

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

#46

Post by emteycz »

7thaccount wrote: post #44
jcelerier wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we can see how a really well written very complex electron app like vscode behaves yes, very much worse than the average Qt app in my experience in terms of responsivity, load time and general UI performance

Agreed. I always shudder when colleagues recommend it. Last I checked it took up an enormous amount of resources for an editor.

My VSCode takes considerably less RAM than Webstorm on the same project - and yet IMHO VSCode does it better.

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

#47

Post by R0b0t1 »

brnt wrote: post #38
R0b0t1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How "far" behind it Freepascal you think? I tried to get into it a few years back and in terms of language features it felt like things had stagnated for a decade or more.

It's not that far behind but there is going to be a time investment for whoever undertakes it. The parser is very modular but documentation is sparse. It follows the EBNF notation quite closely, but adding these anonymous structures will require adding intermediate formats to track them and pass them to the machine code generator.

It's pretty heavy work, but not insanely complicated. One of the gating issues seems the existing devs didn't seem to care about these features when I was looking to add them. That may be a problem for someone who does not wish to invest lots of time understanding the codebase.

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

#48

Post by squarefoot »

Yuioup wrote: post #12

Delphi is dead. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Not dead at all, just invisible to the public thanks to Embarcadero and their prices. If you sell a development system at €1.699 up, you send the message that you rather want to deal with a few hundreds big/medium customers than millions of small ones.

For us mere mortals Lazarus comes to the rescue. Not on the same league of modern Delphi editions, but very comparable to those we used when it was popular in the early 2000s.

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

#49

Post by hestefisk »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #39
pjmlp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Where would you find Delphi jobs in Europe? I'm in australia but still do delphi.

Generally firms that work with industrial automation where speed and efficiency are key elements. In wind turbine manufacturing, for instance, I know a lot of firms still use Delphi.

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

#50

Post by jchw »

pjmlp wrote: post #31
jchw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, it was there, regardless.

Citation needed? At least in actual motif. Can’t find any information about either thing.
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