Borland was just another example of Death-By-MBA.
Delphi still exists and is actively developed
171–180 of 250 posts
Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed
#172I have to repost https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28491963 : My main problem with delphi: it is "too proprietary". It was a very productive ide in the 90's or early 2000's but lost their path and never recovered. Some new versions broke compatibility with previous version's components. There was the case where you paid a good amount of money on some proprietary components and they simply wouldn't work in the next…
They should break off and commercialize just the cross-platform GUI and rapid development IDE for that and put a language like Go under it. Go with a good RAD IDE would be so amazing, like yank out my wallet and throw money at you while shaking amazing. Give me a good cross platform GUI. Give me a good IDE for it. Don't make me learn yet another fucking programming language that exists nowhere else to use it. The las…
Have you seen this, and do you have a perspective on it? https://www.remobjects.com/elements/gold/
Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed
#173Embarcadero was acquired by the same jackasses that bought out a company where I used to work. The new owners had a bunch of attitude and kept crowing on about "their playbook". It turned out that the primary technology that they were buying us for was the one part of our product that we actually licensed from another vendor. I believe they spent millions and didn't get what they were looking for. They had an offshor…
So in your opinion, this should be avoided? Looking to try something new ( old ) and this got me excited but your comment has soured it a bit for me.
I wouldn't expect much in terms of value or growth from a platform owned by those clowns.
Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed
#174We use Delphi at work. We've gotten a lot of pressure from customers to move to the web. 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…
What no one in the responses is talking about ...is speed of using the UI during day to day operations. Web interfaces are extremely clunky to use when trying to do things via only-keyboard (which is the only way to have muscle-memory help you zip through forms) methods. They are slow to update and in some cases, the Web browser's UI is fighting with you, such as offering to replace your input with the previous data…
On my new ThinkPad and the latest Delphi it compiles/links at 50-60K lines/second that performance has been consistent throughout the 25 years using Delphi. What it means in practice is you change a line of code, press F9 and the program is executing with no discernable delay.
Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. :(
ah the GUI designers from Borland, light years ahead of everything else... it just worked and looked nice (compared to Microsoft shitshow that was Visual Studio back then), was very easy to learn and its the only thing in software I've seen in 20 years which deserved the title RAD.
Totally agreed. I have done both a lot of work with the Borland tools and over the years with various web based libraries and languages, Borland wins hands down, in spite of the underlying horrible mess.
Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed
#176I 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.
Delphi Win32 executables I compiled last century still work fine. I hope the programs I am writing today will still work on whatever version of Windows is around in 25 years. Microsoft for all its many faults has not yet screwed up the Win32 sub-system.
Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can use it for free with the community edition ( https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter ) if your revenue is less than $5,000.
Just get Lazarus.
Agree. If someone is paying you a shit-tonne of money to write a program then get Delphi Professional for US$1400, its still a good product, the more expensive $5K client/server/architect versions are not worth it at any price as third party delphi libraries for database and reports are cheaper and far superior (devart/fastreports/etc)
You can do the same with Lazarus without any external libraries. I wrote a fairly polished production system for a seafood factory in Lazarus 15 years ago which is still in daily use.
Amazing what a single developer with the right tool can achieve, shame we cant get any young people interested in anything but apps.
Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
CSS Grid Layout would be the modern way of doing that on the web. But even old school HTML tables could easily accomplish the UI in that video.
> CSS Grid Layout would be the modern way of doing that on the web. How do you handle the transition at 2:04 where "Last Name" is moved from its own row to sharing a row with "First Name"? Keep in mind I might want to add a third element in that row afterwards. IIRC with tables you'd have to modify the column spans of all the other rows which is way too much effort. How does it work with the CSS grid layout?
With CSS grid you can define row & column template, and assign names to them. Then name your fieldset to be placed in there. Search CSS Tricks Grid, if you want to know more
Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed
#179Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
“ >150 input fields including multiple child tables up to levels 3 deep with their own grids” Yeah i’ve built single page apps with more input fields than this and grid tables all in a single view. Are you sure this cant be easily done? Coincidentally that was first 15 years ago with extjs, second time with react 3 years ago - the latter being a slower process but still pretty much doable.
> Are you sure this cant be easily done? No, I'm no web expert. We've not found a way so far, and I've not seen something like this on the web, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong. edit: to clarify, I don't doubt one can get 150 fields in a view on the web. But can one dev do it in one day and have it look great?
Err... Yeah, depending on what you mean by "field", the answer is yes. In one day it is possible to stick 150 fields in an HTML document and apply some CSS to make it look nice.