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AFAIK they signed a deal with education ministry of Turkey so that Delphi will be taught as the programming language in technical high schools.
Super evil
Delphi was great, until C# and WinForms came along. Then there was honestly no reason for me to use Delphi again. All the other UI junk in Visual Studio is terrible in comparison, for me.
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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!
I think their original pricing scheme for the first 5 or 6 versions of Delphi was fine. The cheapest version was just $100, which even a student could buy by saving for a few weeks (get them hooked while young, etc :-P). The versions that added features focused on enterprises were more expensive but these wouldn't be needed by a lot of people (a lot of Delphi programmers were making small shareware utilities instead…
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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?
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/form-elements.html#th...
I still have the feeling it's the most productive way to create beautiful native Windows desktop programs. Rapid application development is not an empty promise here. All my other endeavours with UI programming (Java/Swing, HTML/JS frontends, QT) felt way less productive. Maybe MS C# is the closest to Delphi nowadays.
I wonder if anyone here has experience with both Delphi and SwiftUI. I'd be curious to know which one is more comfortable.
Delphi is really from a different age, simpler times, when the common paradigm was having the app directly connected to some sort of SQL database, which serves as a stable, static data source for the UI. Making glorified database editors is what it was really good at.
These days.. things changed. UIs need to be flexible, reactive, reusable, adaptable. UIs that can handle uncertain states, asynchronous data flows, change dynamically and so on. SwiftUI / React / Flutter all ended up at the same paradigm, it's a much more advanced way of doing things. Also, high level languages are much more pleasant to work with.
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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.
Isn't wpf deprecated too? I wish there was an official way to make apps in windows...
Basically Win32, Forms, WPF for .NET, Win32/MFC for C++, or web stuff like ASP.NET, possibly with Blazor.
Even though UWP did not went away, and they keep at the N interaction of it with WinAppSDK, I would lose any sleep over it.
I remember one of the great things about delphi was that it statically linked everything into the single .exe making it totally self contained. A Windows GUI program could be a couple hundred KB, no other DLLs required. C/C++ could do the same but you were stuck with nasty raw win32 calls and a lower level language.
FWIW C++ Builder could do the same and had access to VCL too. AFAIK (never tried it) you could mix Delphi and C++ in the same project if you wanted.
However the lack of ways to design non-trivial UIs quickly does not make it seen feasible at the moment.
Then there's the fact that Win32 is like bedrock in terms of stability. We've got forms that's been designed and coded over 15 years ago which still works just as fine as they did back then.
We've got input-heavy UIs, the one I'm working on right now is a single window with >150 input fields including multiple child tables up to levels 3 deep with their own grids. Getting the UI layout done and components connected to the DB will take me a day tops, it'll look great and based on history should work for the next 10+ years. The web seems like such a step back whenever I try it.
I still have the feeling it's the most productive way to create beautiful native Windows desktop programs. Rapid application development is not an empty promise here. All my other endeavours with UI programming (Java/Swing, HTML/JS frontends, QT) felt way less productive. Maybe MS C# is the closest to Delphi nowadays.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if anyone here has experience with both Delphi and SwiftUI. I'd be curious to know which one is more comfortable.
Well there's a reason all the WYSIWYG UI editors died out. They are a quick way to whip up a passable UI, but usually turns out to be quite ugly under the hood, hard to reuse, and a pain to maintain. Delphi is really from a different age, simpler times, when the common paradigm was having the app directly connected to some sort of SQL database, which serves as a stable, static data source for the UI. Making glorified…