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Why did Borland fail?

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Re: Why did Borland fail?

#141

Post by reality_czech »

autokad wrote: post #45
alecco wrote: post #14

Not a single mention of all the dirty tricks by Microsoft?! What a shallow memory. I remember how Microsoft cornered Borland and others to use some undocumented features of their OS, then make them incompatible. Remember, back in the 90s updating software on mass scale was a PITA, end users were expected to never update. Also abusing their dominance to aggressively target key developers and contractors, copying any g…

all tech companies do some shady stuff. look how apple sought to bury Adobe because Jobs felt slighted, manufacturers having to install nets to stop factory workers from committing suicide, evading hundreds of billions in paying taxes through Irish tax evasion. Stopping competitors from getting products to market through questionable patents and an army of lawyers. Uber making false calls mess with Lyft's operations.…

No, not all tech companies do illegal things. It's a false equivalence.

* Chinese manufacturers aren't really "Silicon Valley tech companies" and workers there committing suicide has more to do with Chinese culture and poor work practices than technology.

* Keeping money in Ireland is not a crime. The government set up really dumb tax laws, and companies responded rationally to them.

* Patents suck, but again, it's a government issue. The government sets up patent laws, and you have to abide by them. Some companies are more abusive about this than others, but they all have to follow the law.

* Uber making false calls was unethical, and possibly a crime. Uber does suck as a company but not all tech companies are Uber.

* Google didn't approach Facebook to fix wages. Steve Jobs did that. It was illegal and the government fined everyone involved quite a bit of money (although probably not as much as they should have).

* "Google" doesn't sit on Apple's board. Some people from Google used to sit on Apple's board. If there is a conflict of interest they are supposed to resign, and that's exactly what happened when Google started competing with Apple's iPhone.

* Google doesn't bully suppliers, Apple does that (sometimes). Google doesn't manufacture Android phones, they get other companies to do that for them. Yes, even that Nexus phones.

* Microsoft was convicted by the Department of Justice of anticompetitive practices. If I remember correctly there were felony charges. If you don't understand how seriously unethical they were in the 80s and 90s, you haven't been paying attention at all.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#142

Post by axitanull »

frik wrote: post #133
acemarke wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" s…

While WebStorm and other JetBrain IDEs are great, the RAD/WYSIWYG part is missing. We had already Frontage/Dreamweaver for HTML3-4. If JetBrains would add a HTML5 WYSIWYG editor based on webkit/blink to their IDEs, it would be awesome.

I think that would not happen, with all the difference and mess in implementation under multiple browsers (even with webkit based Safari and Chrome), and file watcher+auto reload is less of a headache.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#143

Post by pjmlp »

mikerichards wrote: post #100
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…

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. I…

> 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".

I feel the same.

Having been brought up with all Borland products, Smalltalk Visual Works and Oberon, I really cannot grasp they keep themselves in a UNIX V7 world, instead of a Xerox PARC one.

And I did use Emacs several years, while deeply missing Borland tooling, as that was the best thing one could look for in UNIX back then (VIM did not exist just VI).

However in 2015, there are so many nice IDEs also available for UNIX...

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#144

Post by pjmlp »

frik wrote: post #133
acemarke wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" s…

While WebStorm and other JetBrain IDEs are great, the RAD/WYSIWYG part is missing. We had already Frontage/Dreamweaver for HTML3-4. If JetBrains would add a HTML5 WYSIWYG editor based on webkit/blink to their IDEs, it would be awesome.

Netbeans has it for HTML5 apps.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#145

Post by kzhahou »

atilaneves wrote: post #120
mikerichards wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I…

I use Emacs with intelligent realtime code analysis. Anybody who doesn't use the best Emacs packages for the languages they write is doing it wrong.

Which packages, and what languages do you write in?

For the life of me, I've never been able to get any advanced code stuff to work. Auto-complete etc.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#146

Post by pjmlp »

atombender wrote: post #58
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.

For me (Delphi programmer until around 2001), there were several more important factors in the eventual failure of Delphi. First, at the time Borland (or, briefly, Inprise) tried to move into the "enterprise" market, with expensive, nebulously defined "middleware" products like Midas. This is why they aggressively pursued failed tech like CORBA. It was a disaster, and had nothing to offer those who wanted to get stuf…

Agree.

Funny thing is that now, around 20 years later we have .NET going fully AOT with .NET Native (kind of Delphi experience) and C++/CX with XAML (kind of C++ Builder experience).

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#147

Post by tomjen3 »

frik wrote: post #133
acemarke wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" s…

While WebStorm and other JetBrain IDEs are great, the RAD/WYSIWYG part is missing. We had already Frontage/Dreamweaver for HTML3-4. If JetBrains would add a HTML5 WYSIWYG editor based on webkit/blink to their IDEs, it would be awesome.

I don't think so. They have an excellent IDE for editing html on a source basis and an HTML WYSIWYG wouldn't have a developer as a main target, most developers would prefer editing the html directly (and would need to, unless they used a templating system based on the ideas of Enlive).

These days the target market for WYSIWYG HTML editors would be probably be using an online CMS like WP - which actually has a WYSIWYG HTML editor. Failing that, Microsoft Word actually had nice HTML output last time I checked.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#148

Post by pjbrunet »

IMO it was the Internet. C and Pascal dominated till 1994, then Java books were everywhere. I loved TP5 (the manual was awesome) but dropped everything to learn Java which promised the world: write once, run everywhere and Internet applications! Woohoo. Then Perl and Javascript were on the scene. WIRED magazine! Very exciting times. Netscape Navigator Gold baby. Delphi was "Microsloth Windoze" not even on my radar.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#149

Post by tomjen3 »

aptwebapps wrote: post #113
_d8fd wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For me the features I appreciate the most are the debugger, framework support, and decent multi-language syntax support (for when there's js embedded in the html). All that and it runs a lot faster than PyDev.

I was so happy when I found out that you can select a string and then inject a new language right there which gets you code completion for that language. I was even more happy when it allowed me to edit that string in a separate window as if existed in a separate file.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#150

Post by pjmlp »

dwc wrote: post #88
stark3 wrote: post #84

It was a long time ago, and I can't find anything to corroborate this on internet searches, but: Didn't Borland attempt to charge for the use of a c runtime module? They attempted to profit from software developed using their c compiler. So, not only would they make money selling the compiler, but anyone that used programs written with their compiler would have to pay also. Somewhere around that time, they lost the w…

Not sure if it's the same thing you're talking about, but waaay back they did a license change for their language products that said something along the lines of anything produced with their compilers belonged to them. There was a huge outcry and pretty much right away they said "oops! our lawyers got a bit happy" and fixed it. I don't recall exactly when that was. Their Pascal was "Borland Pascal" at the time. I thi…

Around 1991 timeframe, if I recall correctly.

Basically the EULA forbade the use of Borland C++ to write compilers.

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