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Why did Borland fail?

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Re: Why did Borland fail?

#171

Post by tomjen3 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #52

In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yokam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yokam replied without hesitation "Absolutely." Any day of the week! Why is this even in question?

Because a language, and to a lesser extend an IDE, needs an ecosystem and that is based on number of users. This is even more true today - do you think it would be easier to find a book on C# or Ada? A programmer who can code in it? Getting your questions answered on Stack Overflow?

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#172

Post by lispm »

tomjen3 wrote: post #163
mikerichards wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to Nhanh. Emacs, Slime and Common Lisp is something that I would give an exception to. The major productivity I give to that combo is the ability to change the code on the fly while debugging, especially Common Lisp's continue from exception mechanism. Smalltalk environments have had this ability forever. I just imagine how much more productive I could be if in Visual Studio I could edit-n-continue on everything...ev…

Common Lisps exception mechanism is indeed out of this world, but that isn't something that has been implemented in any other language that I know of (not even Clojure) and you have to pay a fortune to get a CL system that works cross-platform with things like threading or a FI that allows lisp callbacks from C code. Java has supported both since forever (and its java.util.concurrent namespace means any old Java prog…

> pay a fortune to get a CL system that works cross-platform with things like threading or a FI that allows lisp callbacks from C code

like 'zero'. ;-) Use Clozure CL: http://ccl.clozure.com

> Clozure CL also provides a mechanism for defining callbacks: lisp functions which can be called from foreign code.

> Clozure CL provides facilities which enable multiple threads of execution

Runs on Linux / Windows / Mac OS X and others.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#173

Post by frik »

tomjen3 wrote: post #147
frik wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A joke, right?

> HTML WYSIWYG wouldn't have a developer as a main target, most developers would prefer editing the html directly

WYSIWYG always had a split-screen view which allows one to work in design and code mode at the same time (and see the changes in the other mode). It's very efficient.

> Microsoft Word actually had nice HTML output

MS Word 2000-2013 web page export is based on the old Frontpage engine, and generates invalid HTML4 and converts vector graphics and word art to VML, the proprietary predecessor of SVG, that IE10+ don't even support anymore (except with legacy quirks mode mode).

> online CMS like WP

The contentEditiable HTML4 API that CMS use is sadly completely broken in every browser in a different way - the experience and the code output quality is far worse than Frontpage ever was - and Dreamweaver is better in every aspect.

There is a reason why we have BBCode and Markdown, because contentEditiable isn't that great at the moment. And as several browser vendors have a competitive advantage with their web based Office services (Office365 Web Word, iCloud.com Pages, Google Docs), they will never fix the various bugs of contentEditiable in IE/Safari/Chrome.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#174

Post by ak39 »

desireco42 wrote: post #63

Borland was beloved company that made tools that made programming enjoyable. Answer covers all the main points, I can only be sad that they don't exist today and can make tools. Delphi with all my good will is simply not the tool I would use today even if it wasn't priced as it is.

Why not? If you were to develop Windows desktop applications today, what choices do you have that compete with Delphi? (Serious question)

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#175

Post by frik »

axitanull wrote: post #142
frik wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

WYSIWYG always had a split-screen view which allows one to work in design and code mode at the same time (and see the changes in the other mode).

It's very efficient and less headache. WebStorm could add webkit and sync the code view like Dreamweaver. JetBrain's IDE is Java based and integrating a C++ based WYSIWYG view might be more complicated. And all the Java based browsers have been discontinued like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotJava .

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#176

Post by busterarm »

thejosh wrote: post #91
_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.

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

byebug, pry

or even better, pry-byebug!

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#177

Post by DCoder »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #129
_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.

Not PyCharm user, but IntelliJ IDEA, PhpStorm and WebStorm - they are from one family. Most important things are: 1) Static errors analyzing. Saves a lot of time. Really, hundreds hours of time. 2) Code completion (VS users call it "IntelliSense"). 3) Refactoring tools. You can change name of method in one place and IDE will change all usages of this method everywhere in code. It's extremely important.

I'll second all those points, especially the first one, but I'll add a word of caution. All of the points you mentioned require the IDE to parse all the code, not just the code you are writing at this moment. If it doesn't know the type of $foo, it can't tell what $foo->getModel() calls and therefore it can't rename that getModel(), for example. This means you have to be careful in projects using older frameworks or CMS. From recent experience, a great example of such an atrocious codebase is Magento:

- their method calls are excessively chained, which means a failure to analyse step 2 of the chain blocks analysis of all further chained calls

- their phpDoc either doesn't exist or is actively misleading at times

- they rely on magic methods all throughout the codebase without properly annotating them

- https://imgur.com/RMxWEgR

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#178

Post by EugeneOZ »

DCoder wrote: post #177
EugeneOZ wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not PyCharm user, but IntelliJ IDEA, PhpStorm and WebStorm - they are from one family. Most important things are: 1) Static errors analyzing. Saves a lot of time. Really, hundreds hours of time. 2) Code completion (VS users call it "IntelliSense"). 3) Refactoring tools. You can change name of method in one place and IDE will change all usages of this method everywhere in code. It's extremely important.

I'll second all those points, especially the first one, but I'll add a word of caution. All of the points you mentioned require the IDE to parse all the code, not just the code you are writing at this moment. If it doesn't know the type of $foo, it can't tell what $foo->getModel() calls and therefore it can't rename that getModel(), for example. This means you have to be careful in projects using older frameworks or…

It's bad design of Magento and army of old PHP tools, with overuse of magic and dynamic typing.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#179

Post by Htsthbjig »

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"."

What is amazing is that in 2015 there is people out there that believes Vim or Emacs have no intelligent, realtime analysis.

In fact, in year 2015 Emacs and Vim have the best real time, intelligent analysis out there for those that know how to use them and are trained on them.

You can use elisp inside emacs and automate EVERYTHING running circles around anything commercial.

I have a company making software and I know. With the proper training those tools are incredible.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#180

Post by dempseye »

duaneb wrote: post #166
tomjen3 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> I have no doubt they would be even better in a good IDE. Do you really think the best programmers spend enough time refactoring for the use of an IDE to help?

Is refactoring a bad thing now?
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