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Why did Borland fail?

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Re: Why did Borland fail?

#151

Post by jwr »

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".

Oh, that's amusing, and rather misinformed. Emacs in particular, when programming Common Lisp or Clojure, has a really impressive environment that Java IDEs can only aspire to (in part, that's an unfair comparison, because CL and Clojure are well suited to interactive programming and Java isn't).

I would be more careful with strong words like "professional negligence" or "hardcore, programmer machismo".

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#152

Post by pjmlp »

melling wrote: post #8
asveikau wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sun also had an overpriced compiler, to go with the overpriced Unix running on overpriced hardware. Then it saw these replaced with free, free, and cheaper products, respectively.

Sun made its money from hardware. I never worked anywhere that used Sun's compilers. It was always gcc.

I did.

We always used the UNIX vendor compilers back when I was doing UNIX development in the .com days.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#153

Post by tomjen3 »

srj wrote: post #128
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 guess I can't tell if this post is a troll or not. :) Someone not getting their job done is a problem. Someone using vim as their editor is not. I could understand giving that feedback ("try an IDE") but telling them their job is contingent on it is probably missing the point. Most of the people I work with seem to use vim/emacs, and it doesn't appear to be for "machismo" reasons. It's likely just what they're used…

>Someone not getting their job done is a problem. Someone using vim as their editor is not.

The best programmers I work with use emacs or vim and are good enough to keep up even though most others use intelliJ ides, but it is a handicap, they are just good enough to overcome it. I have no doubt they would be even better in a good IDE.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#154

Post by tomjen3 »

rdtsc wrote: post #116
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…

> where we had to sit him down and tell him he needs to use the right tool for the job or get lost. One can look at it the other way. If your language needs a million lines of IDE code to function and for programmers to be productive with it, maybe it is time to sit down and tell that language to "get lost".

If you are more productive with a million lines of IDE code backing you up + that language than you would be in Emacs with C++, why would you tell that language to get lost?

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#155

Post by laumars »

Ecio78 wrote: post #127
laumars wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By the time the internet came along, and I got into full time development.. .net was out, with "academic" pricing for VS 2003. The web was around for about decade before Microsoft .NET arrived. In fact I remember coding Delphi in an evaluation copy of the IDE given away on a cover CD from .Net magazine (not to be confused with Microsoft .NET). And then a few years later downloading a pirated copy of a beta release…

Actually I remember that Delphi was way more advanced on the TCP/IP side compared to Visual Basic. I remember downloading (for free) quite complete TCP/IP VCLs that included http, ftp, icmp etc.. compared to VB that had nothing (at least for free).

VB and VB.NET are different languages. But yeah, Delphi ran circles around VB in nearly every measurable way. I don't think anyone would seriously argue that VB6 was a better language nor had the better tooling. And earlier versions of VB would have only compared even worse.

As for what libraries VB had for networking, there was some HTTP OCX that was bundled with Internet Explorer (and I don't mean the Trident renderer), which was awful. But aside that, there was only a basic wrapper around the Winsock C libraries. To be fair, the Winsock OCX was pretty decent fot what it was, but you were left to write all the host layers (OSI) for yourself.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#156

Post by pjmlp »

bbarn wrote: post #39

Turbo Pascal was the first software I remember buying in a retail box. Before then it was all copied and school-given software, but something in 15 year old me really felt it was worth buying this tool. It was. That purchase spawned a career out of my evening hobby. Then, a few years later, when I was mostly using C or VB, and only firing up Pascal for fun now and then, Delphi came out. I was super excited. Until I r…

Had used Turbo Pascal 3, 5.5. and 6 for MS-DOS, followed by Turbo C 2.0 and Turbo C++ 1.0.

Eventually I got around buying TPW 1.5 and Turbo C++ for Windows for personal use.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#158

Post by tomjen3 »

duaneb wrote: post #109
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…

> 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 think it's mostly that the current state of "intelligent, realtime code analysis" is so terrible that it can be replaced with "rename" and "find references of". I.e. ctags.

Then you have no idea about the current state of intelligent, realtime code analysis. Any old Java IDE should be able to rename length to size on an interface and have all the classes that implement that interface update the name, then have all the places that calls it update to use the new name.

Try that with rename and you will quickly run into trouble, unless you have only one class that has a method called length.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#159

Post by pjmlp »

conradfr wrote: post #44
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.

I have fond memories of Delphi 3 during my high school years. I did a marketing internship at Borland France around 2004 and Delphi was still the cash cow but a great deal of effort was put toward "enterprise" softwares like StartTeam, Together etc that were from acquired companies IIRC. It's easy to judge now but back then the shift toward the web apps was slowly happening, C#/.Net was not especially a success ...

> C#/.Net was not especially a success ...

It was in Portugal, but the focus was in ASP.NET not WinForms.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#160

Post by smitherfield »

jack9 wrote: post #77
whyleyc wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inverse is also true.

The inverse is the same. Losing $1mil can either mean: a) losing 10000 customers b) losing 1 customer. What do you pick? There are more customers who can afford 100$ than 1mil. That's the important factor, not the way you want to present the numbers.

Not really. Small customers are sensitive to fads and trends, while enterprise customers (particularly in the field of software, as we all know!) will stick with a product well past its sell-by date as long as it "works." You have a lot more time to pivot when you start losing enterprise customers than small customers.
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