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Delphi still exists and is actively developed

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Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#81

Post by jhbadger »

optymizer wrote: post #33
jollyllama wrote: post #2

I remember, as a kid, looking up examples of malware. Bots and trojans and such. Invariably, much of it was in Delphi. Why was this so?

At least in the ex-soviet countries, a lot of the legally-questionable software we used to write was in Pascal because that's what we learnt in school. It was an easy transition to go to Delphi - nice RAD IDE for GUI RATs or keygens/cracks, familiar OO language.

Even in the West, Pascal was the standard teaching language even in the late 1980s -- my undergraduate classes and textbooks all used it.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#82

Post by alyandon »

mhd wrote: post #15

...for the enterprise. Which is okay, there's plenty of mixed quality software for that sector. It's just that Delphi used to be a lot more oriented towards beginner to small-business developers. And note that this happened before the web pillow-smothered decent desktop UIs. If it was all about a reduced audience for desktop-based applications and then supporting that, I would understand it more. I haven't been follo…

  the web pillow-smothered decent desktop UIs
Application development has gone backwards so much compared to the RAD tooling from the 90s. I really can't even properly describe it to the younger generation. :(

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#83

Post by kwanbix »

mhd wrote: post #15

...for the enterprise. Which is okay, there's plenty of mixed quality software for that sector. It's just that Delphi used to be a lot more oriented towards beginner to small-business developers. And note that this happened before the web pillow-smothered decent desktop UIs. If it was all about a reduced audience for desktop-based applications and then supporting that, I would understand it more. I haven't been follo…

I think they really screwed up after Delphi 7, when they did the horrible Delphi.NET.

Also, they should have had some better pricing, something like: Personal use: Free. Commercial use: Free until you are making $x a year, like Unity I think, and then different prices.

Note: I might remember wrong, as this was so long ago. I started with Delphi 1.0!

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#84

Post by jkaptur »

hengheng wrote: post #70
panki27 wrote: post #60

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/

Asking as someone who last saw Delphi in computer class at school, what would be the modern equivalent? 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.

I get a little frustrated, because the web is AMAZING for this. Type this in anywhere. Anywhere!

  
  
  sum
  
  
    function sum() {
      result.innerText = parseFloat(foo.value) + parseFloat(bar.value);
    }
That's full of "bad practices" but for the use case you're talking about, who cares?

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#85

Post by kwanbix »

panki27 wrote: post #60

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/

Nowadays they have a free option. Community edition or the like.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#86

Post by Joker_vD »

the_only_law wrote: post #72
hengheng wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking as someone who last saw Delphi in computer class at school, what would be the modern equivalent? 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.

> As someone who last saw Delphi in computer class at school, what would be the modern equivalent? Maybe hard pressed to call it modern, but WinForms is still my go to for quickly making a UI, at least in Windows.

Same here. I've tried to pick up WPF but holy fatcats, what an explosion of XAML files in exchange for... pretty much nothing, really. It's a shame, really.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#87

Post by bluedino »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #9

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'm sure they made a great amount of money doing Turbo C/Pascal via mail order but that market is only so big.

You need the $1,200 compiler suites to make the real cash.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#88

Post by KindOne »

ChildOfChaos wrote: post #64
KindOne wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why would you ever put in your real phone number anyway?

Some websites I have signed up require a real phone number so they send a verification code on account creation.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#89

Post by the_only_law »

Joker_vD wrote: post #86
the_only_law wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who last saw Delphi in computer class at school, what would be the modern equivalent? Maybe hard pressed to call it modern, but WinForms is still my go to for quickly making a UI, at least in Windows.

Same here. I've tried to pick up WPF but holy fatcats, what an explosion of XAML files in exchange for... pretty much nothing, really. It's a shame, really.

I would almost like XAML, if it wasn’t for styling. If it had some CSS like DSL, I’d use it more, but unfortunately overcrowding styles invokes nasty blobs of XML boilerplate often having to override stuff that doesn’t seem relevant to what you want to do.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#90

Post by badsectoracula »

marcodiego wrote: post #65
badsectoracula wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Glade uses GtkBuilder: a format where the UI is described as an XML and built at runtime.

Pretty much all of these programs (Glade, wxFormBuilder, etc) have a similar approach, the point is that the way Delphi (and Lazarus) works is with you working directly with the live instances of the objects that will be serialized on disk - there is a 1:1 mapping between all those and the information is extracted directly from the objects themselves.

In a way Delphi is kinda similar to how Unreal Engine works whereas Glade is kinda similar to how the original Quake engine worked.

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