61–70 of 250 posts
Both Embarcadero.com and Lazarus project homepage refers to that they have the capability of RAD. Lazarus - "RAD - Rapid Application Development." Embarcadero - "RAD Server - Reduces the complexities of rapidly building and deploying a multi-tier turn-key enterprise REST API application server with Swagger support." What does RAD refer to? What is it actually?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Calling RAD Studio a high-quality IDE seems like a stretch to me. I would choose VS Code or a JetBrains product any day of the week. Unfortunately you a kinda stuck with it when developing in Delphi.
I think the .net ecosystem, as a higher level language, was probably less fit for the task.
I used Delphi years and years ago and it was great for building GUI applications quickly and easily. Much nicer than Visual Basic. I probably wouldn't recognize it now, other than I suppose it's still Object Pascal, which is a very good programming language, all things considered; straightforward, not too fancy, not too dumbed down. Free edition: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter
Be warned: You need to enter a valid phone number. They will call you asking on what you plan on building with the software. I've had that happen to me within a few days of downloading the software. Another person had the same experience. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24582890
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Over the years the minimum size of VCL apps increased. Last I checked (10 years ago maybe) it was like 1MB or more compared to 200KB or so in Delphi 3.
Almost certainly is the extended RTTI information - VCL is huge after all and relies heavily on RTTI. The forms, objects, etc you are editing in the form designer are not just stand-ins like in, e.g. Glade, wxFormBuilder, QtDesigner or similar tools, they are live instances of the actual objects that are serialized on disk whenever you save the project with the serialized data becoming part of the program's resources…
For me when Borland became Embarcadero, it seemed like it lost it’s scrappy hacker ethos. Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Delphi, C++ Builder were all very innovative products that catered to the individual developer. The Embarcadero rebrand seems like a turn towards Enterprise. For me now, JetBrains is the new Borland, a scrappy company with a strong focus on what individual developers need and consistently turning out excel…
I still remember Borland’s logo and icons. Something about the 90s and 00s was special and maybe we didn’t appreciate it enough.
Both Embarcadero.com and Lazarus project homepage refers to that they have the capability of RAD. Lazarus - "RAD - Rapid Application Development." Embarcadero - "RAD Server - Reduces the complexities of rapidly building and deploying a multi-tier turn-key enterprise REST API application server with Swagger support." What does RAD refer to? What is it actually?
I have fond memories of Pascal, it's the language of the first programming class I took.
But yeah. The website and the screenshots do not inspire confidence.
Both Embarcadero.com and Lazarus project homepage refers to that they have the capability of RAD. Lazarus - "RAD - Rapid Application Development." Embarcadero - "RAD Server - Reduces the complexities of rapidly building and deploying a multi-tier turn-key enterprise REST API application server with Swagger support." What does RAD refer to? What is it actually?
Rapid Application Development :-P.
Wikipedia has an article[0], but in general it can probably be thought as a precursor to agile (the article says that agile is a RAD method) in that instead of doing some lengthy pre/planing process you use an iterative approach that adapts to what the users want.
In this particular case Lazarus is a RAD IDE in the sense that it allows quick development and iteration of functional GUIs - Delphi was also like that but at some point Borland/Inprise/CodeGear/Embarcadero/Whoever made it more of a name to use for their products ("RAD Studio") than something that describes them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development
One of the best aspects of Delphi is how quickly you can whip together simple GUI applications. The main issue nowadays is finding helpful resources on the internet, as hardly anybody writes Delphi anymore. For the interested, a free Delphi IDE exists (comes with FreePascal compiler): https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
Something that lets me draw a window with two number fields and a button that says "return sum", but it's two minutes of work and self-explanatory.