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Why did Borland fail?

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Re: Why did Borland fail?

#191

Post by mreiland »

Conjoiner wrote: post #183
_ak wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying the market is still dead, but for a company like Borland, 10 years ago there was nothing they could have done to recover from Eclipse taking over the market. Even then, IntelliJ was a relative niche product (compared to the vast ubiquity of Eclipse), and JetBrains did diversify their product portfolio to both more aspects of the development lifecycle and to more specialized needs in IDEs. Anyway, my po…

>"there was nothing they could have done" How about creating a better product worth paying for? Eclipse was and is not exactly universally well liked.

agreed, Loved the old Borland compilers, hated JBuilder.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#192

Post by eru »

laumars wrote: post #57
aurora72 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days Torrent activities are extremely effective thanks to computers like Raspberry Pi and whenever an application appears which is useful but must be paid to be used, a reverse engineered and cracked version of it joins the Torrent network soon. I think, business of software as a downloadable application is dead. See what Microsoft is doing.

You talk as if this is a recent thing that the Raspberry Pi has enabled. Yet people have been pirating software long before bit-torrent was around; and people have been using torrents, specifically, long before the Raspberry Pi's were a thing. I very much doubt the Raspberry Pi has made any significant impact on the numbers of people who torrent - let alone pirate in the wider scope of distribution mechanisms.

How would the Raspberry Pi have any relation to torrenting at all?

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#193

Post by riquito »

dempseye wrote: post #180
duaneb wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

>> 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?

It isn't, he just intended that the best programmers refactor less (since they are the best they must get things right or better predict the future more often then the others).

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#194

Post by frik »

tomjen3 wrote: post #188
frik wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

The current year is 2015, MS word has come a long way since 2001. In fact they bragged with clean HTML output, suitable for inserting into your blog, in MS Word 2007. If you haven't worked with Word for almost 15 years do yourself a service and don't assume it looks much the same anymore - most the complaints I hear about it are no longer so much an issue in the newer versions. Also I have no idea where you got the i…

You are wrong, please test it again. In Word 2010 it still uses the Frontpage engine to output not so good HTML4 code with VML graphics. Btw. Office applications haven't changed that much since Office 97 (beside regular interface changes).

Wordpress uses the TinyMCE rich text editor which uses the contentEditable/designMode API, TinyMCE is one of many such editors that try to fix many of the glitches: https://en.support.wordpress.com/editors/ , http://www.tinymce.com/ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_rich-text_editor

And just because some have never have seen a good HTML WYSIWYG editor doesn't mean it's a bad rapid development method and should not be integrated in a modern IDE.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#195

Post by crististm »

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.

If professional software developers don't get to have professional IDEs for their languages, then the software quality will continue to stay at the present levels.

The mentality of "good-enough and not even that" is pervasive. When IDEs market is dead, this means the professional pride of the industry as a whole is nonexistent.

(Eclipse does not even come close to amateur level, let alone professional. Vim and emacs which you have to configure yourself to come close to a decent level of proficiency don't count either - I'm using all three)

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#196

Post by kawsper »

Ecio78 wrote: post #126
giancarlostoro wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly I always wanted to get into Delphi, but it being unaffordable (even as a student - which JetBrain and MS give me their IDE's for free...) as well as the lack of books or online documentation are a factor. I try using FreePascal with Lazarus, but Lazarus / FP still lack the proper documentation as well sadly.

That's strange, I remember myself buying an Italian dev magazine back at the end of the 90s that included a full copy of Delphi (ok, 16bit version) with application redist rights. I think I probably paid it the equivalent of 10euro.. One thing that I liked a lot about Delphi (compared to VB for example) that there were plenty of free (sometimes with sources too) VCL components that could be downloaded and used for yo…

I was also introduced to Delphi from a computer magazine in Denmark, they even used it as a theme in the next magazines where you would follow articles on how to code Delphi.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#197

Post by serge2k »

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?

Absolutely.

They design it well the first time. They refactor is to a better design as needed as new requirements arise.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#198

Post by serge2k »

hendzen wrote: post #161
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 work on a large C++ codebase in emacs. I find emacs keybindings and extensibility (via elisp) far superior to any IDE - and I have tried Eclipse, CLion (IDEA for C++), Code/Blocks and Netbeans. For C/C++ specifically, the state of code analysis in emacs has greatly improved due to clang. For example, I get full auto-complete (including for variables declared 'auto') in emacs with irony-mode [0] for code completion,…

I find C++ much easier to write in Sublime (or vim) vs Java.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#199

Post by serge2k »

duaneb wrote: post #164
tomjen3 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is still a rename operation. I have difficulty understanding how this would require an IDE for anything but the more complex codebases, and even then, I would much prefer a discrete code server. Refactoring is still in its infancy. A), it's not entirely possible on C/C++ because of macros. B), they are serialized extremely poorly to diffs, so any boon from refactoring is sidestepped by SCM. C), most of the refac…

Using a tool to refactor is better for source control. The diff sucks, but it sucks because it actually found every instance and refactored properly, meaning going through to review it is simpler as long as you trust the tool. We should be using tools for this type of thing, for exactly the same rules as automated formatting should be the default response to any debate on formatting issues.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#200

Post by shiggerino »

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".

That's pure nonsense. There is nothing that prevents languages like Lisp or Smalltalk from being used with a console editor and the compile-pray-debug cycle, but that's no reason to shoot yourself in the foot. This is true of any language, but for some reason there's a large mass of developers of those other languages that see shitty tools and incomplete programs (remember kids, high LOC count means bloat!) as some kind of virtue.
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