Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why did Borland fail?

quora.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 269 posts

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#91

Post by thejosh »

_d8fd wrote: post #73
jquery wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A coworker introduced me to PyCharm after years of development in vim, and it has been an incredible productivity boost. It's painful to watch coworkers slowly fiddle around with text editors. I almost don't like telling people this because it's such a professional competitive advantage for me after switching. Even my coworkers using Sublime run into pain points that I don't (perhaps because they aren't installing al…

What are your top 2 or 3 fav productive boosts in PyCharm? I've tried RubyMine for Ruby, and I didn't like it so I went back to Sublime.

I'm just curious those using Sublime how they debug their programs?

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#92

Post by wampus »

staunch wrote: post #89
nadams wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And some young people parroting how wonderful Microsoft and Bill Gates are today. Compared to what Microsoft used to be like - recently Microsoft has made some pretty, surprising, awesome moves. Specifically their open source movement (including .Net). You would never have seen that 10-20 years ago. I'm sure if you walked into Gates's office and said "I think we should open source this" - I have a feeling he would…

It's not as if Microsoft voluntarily got nicer. They did every dirty thing they could to dominate the PC industry and simply failed. Now they're beginning to steer their leaky ship in a better direction, good for them. For me personally, I'll never be a fan of the company that selfishly held the web back with IE for a decade because they didn't want to compete. Sic semper tyrannis! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embra…

What you don't understand is that Bill Gates is from the future. I don't wanna talk about time travel shit. Cause if we start talking about it, then we're gonna be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws. It doesn't matter. The point is, Gates grew up in a dystopian world and traveled back in time to divert money from the assholes that created it towards charitable enterprises to fix the parts of humanity that were breaking down. Only time will tell if this strategy will work, but we have all the time in the world (and then some), thanks to time travel.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#93

Post by vezzy-fnord »

staunch wrote: post #89
nadams wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And some young people parroting how wonderful Microsoft and Bill Gates are today. Compared to what Microsoft used to be like - recently Microsoft has made some pretty, surprising, awesome moves. Specifically their open source movement (including .Net). You would never have seen that 10-20 years ago. I'm sure if you walked into Gates's office and said "I think we should open source this" - I have a feeling he would…

It's not as if Microsoft voluntarily got nicer. They did every dirty thing they could to dominate the PC industry and simply failed. Now they're beginning to steer their leaky ship in a better direction, good for them. For me personally, I'll never be a fan of the company that selfishly held the web back with IE for a decade because they didn't want to compete. Sic semper tyrannis! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embra…

I partially agree. Much of MS' recent moves are admirable, but they're clearly revivals of sidetracked projects and desperation moves to stay relevant as desktop OS dominance alone is beginning to lose its grip.

I wouldn't be all that snide about them. However, I can't say I find their platforms particularly palatable in general.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#94

Post by acemarke »

_d8fd wrote: post #73
jquery wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A coworker introduced me to PyCharm after years of development in vim, and it has been an incredible productivity boost. It's painful to watch coworkers slowly fiddle around with text editors. I almost don't like telling people this because it's such a professional competitive advantage for me after switching. Even my coworkers using Sublime run into pain points that I don't (perhaps because they aren't installing al…

What are your top 2 or 3 fav productive boosts in PyCharm? I've tried RubyMine for Ruby, and I didn't like it so I went back to Sublime.

I've been a WebStorm fanboy since I purchased a license during a sale two years ago. The biggest selling point for WebStorm for me is its smart searching abilities. "Find In Files" doesn't just do text search, it's also smart enough to allow you to include or exclude matches in strings and comments. It also has a great parser that understands the structure of your code well enough to do legitimate "Find References" searches with really good results in spite of Javascript's dynamicness.

Obviously Python is a very dynamic language as well, so PyCharm has most of the same strong points. I'd been using the Community edition for a while, but finally picked up a Commercial license a couple weeks ago. In this case, the feature that finally convinced me to pay for it was no-kidding Remote Debugging. Drop a .egg next to your deployed app and stick an extra import and connection call into your code, and then PyCharm's debugger (which is another great feature in and of itself) just flat-out works over SSH.

Ultimately, both these tools have saved me enough time and effort to pay for themselves repeatedly.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#95

Post by CydeWeys »

voidfunc wrote: post #29
_ak wrote: post #16

As a former Borland employee (not for very long, 2006-2009, and actually working in their Austrian offices, which originally became part of the company through the Segue acquisition), I certainly didn't have the complete picture, but our managers, even going as far as those located in Cupertino, and later Austin, were quite open about what Borland's issue was: even with the rise of Java, they thought they could conti…

Someone should tell JetBrains the whole IDE market is dead.

Borland was also many times JetBrains' headcount at its peak, and even today is significantly larger. It doesn't follow that because a market supports a company of one size, it must also support a company of a much larger size.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#96

Post by coderjames »

T-A wrote: post #28
adrianlmm wrote: post #10

I used Delphi for more tan 10 years, so this is what I believe it went wrong: * They lost Anders Hejlsberg * Free compilers got aceptable. * Lack of back compatibility, new VCL components from one version weren't compatible with older ones, every new versión require to biy the new components. * To expensive. * No new books to learn Delphi, they are to old. I'm still using Delphi 7 for some projects.

Pretty much my view too. Anyone who knew Delphi immediately went "OMG that's Delphi/VCL with C-like syntax!" when they saw C#/.NET ca ~2000. And once Microsoft started giving away VS Express for free in 2005, Borland's original market - IDEs and compilers for the masses - was well and truly dead. It's easy to blame management for shifting focus to enterprise software, but they had to try doing something new.

Your description of C#/.NET sounds like it might get me to take another look at C# in the future.

I learned Windows programming on-the-job using Delphi and then thought I should investigate a "more common" C++ environment (I already knew console-based C++). Learning that _Visual_ C++ had no similar RAD environment was really shocking. My resource editor isn't attached to an an automatic code generator? Say what?

After that experience with Visual C++, I'd assumed Microsoft did roughly the same thing with "Visual C#" and never gave it a more than cursory look. I also had the fear that this new .NET thing would be yet another technology they hype then deprecate. What's the official Windows GUI framework this month? Is it Win32 Or maybe MFC? Or was it WPF or WinForms or some new XAML thing? (Sorry, went off on a tangent there...)

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#97

Post by CydeWeys »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #20
asveikau wrote: post #3

Compilers used to be something you paid money for. It took a while, but open source and I would say gcc in particular killed that. It's funny how gcc was around for a long time, but it was only in the 2000s that cash cow compilers started dying. I think that coincides a bit with Linux and OS X becoming popular for developers. For example, it wasn't until 2005 that Microsoft started providing a VS express SKU. You see…

Compilers used to be something that nobody could afford to work on for free. Mostly because you had to start from scratch and move forward. I don't know if gcc started as an improvement in pcc or not but for its early years it was both functional and atrocious. Comparing its generated code to the Greenhills C compiler you just shook your head and wondered why would anyone ever advocate this stuff? But the really magi…

> It really is a fascinating thing to consider and I expect that someone could write a very entertaining book about it at some point.

Someone already did write that book, and that someone is RMS! If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend "Free Software, Free Society". And in the spirit of things, it of course available Freely: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf

(Though I do have a hardcopy which I'd never part with.)

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#98

Post by hibikir »

brianwawok wrote: post #87
ExpiredLink wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, JBuilder cost almost $500 back then. Eclipse initially wasn't better but open (for extensions) and gratis.

I pay approx that for Idea. So people will pay that if the product is good.

Hopefully you pay far less than that now: Their prices have come down. But yes, it used to be a $600 product, that was totally worth it to many developers, because of how much better it was than Eclipse. In a world full of boilerplate like Java, IntelliJ's intentions just saved so much time. I remember asking companies that were using Eclipse to please let me use my own license of IntelliJ, because just what alt + tab and alt + insert brought to the table saved more than the price of admission on any given month. I made a similar argument for a second and even third monitor, given the resulutions we had those days.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#99

Post by hibikir »

lbruder wrote: post #21
adrianlmm wrote: post #10

I used Delphi for more tan 10 years, so this is what I believe it went wrong: * They lost Anders Hejlsberg * Free compilers got aceptable. * Lack of back compatibility, new VCL components from one version weren't compatible with older ones, every new versión require to biy the new components. * To expensive. * No new books to learn Delphi, they are to old. I'm still using Delphi 7 for some projects.

Still using D7 nearly everyday, alongside XE7 at work. The impressive, yet sad, thing is 2002's Delphi 7 still runs circles around XE7. Fast, robust, sound documentation. Even Visual Studio and IntelliJ feel weird compared to the simplicity of that old IDE. Sure, lots of parts are missing, no refactoring, no reformatting, whatever. For me it's more fun to use D7 than anything else at the moment. Bad sign.

That's not really about the IDE side of Delphi, but the compiler and runtime side of Delphi. It was an absolutely awesome product, targeting the individual developer or small team, writing a custom application. Nothing I've ever worked since compares for that. But it's limitations are the same as Ruby on Rails limitations: Wonderful at one thing, only a headache anywhere else, and as we ask developers to do other things, the tools just stop being quite so good.

Looking at what we do on websites today, and how much it costs to build it, it sure feels like we've been taking steps backwards for quite a while.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#100

Post by mikerichards »

jquery wrote: post #72
voidfunc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone should tell JetBrains the whole IDE market is dead.

A coworker introduced me to PyCharm after years of development in vim, and it has been an incredible productivity boost. It's painful to watch coworkers slowly fiddle around with text editors. I almost don't like telling people this because it's such a professional competitive advantage for me after switching. Even my coworkers using Sublime run into pain points that I don't (perhaps because they aren't installing al…

It's almost professional negligence. I had the same situation 15+ years ago when Eclipse was coming out and Java was on the rise. We really didn't know Java all that well and so Eclipse's auto-completion and doc popups were a godsend. The guy sitting there with Vi(m) was bogging down beyond belief. It got to the point, where we had to sit him down and tell him he needs to use the right tool for the job or get lost.

It's amazing that in 2015 we have people that use Emacs, Vim, or other editors that don't have intelligent, realtime code analysis and we consider that "hardcore, programmer machismo".

Post reply on HN