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Why did Borland fail?

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Re: Why did Borland fail?

#211

Post by kriro »

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.

Slightly off topic but I think they would be a great acquisition target for Google. Acquire, open source, push hard. I think there's tremendous strategic advantage in providing the goto tools for programmers. Could be well worth giving up a nice revenue stream, too. [it's similar to providing scholarships and other "early access" recruiting measures]

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#212

Post by lvillani »

MichaelCrawford wrote: post #209
_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…

I regard Eclipse as a tool of the Devil. I'll be taking up Android again soon. Every time I try I find Eclipse giving me the goatse but now I'm going to use TextWrangler and Ant.

  > I'll be taking up Android again soon. Every time I try I find Eclipse [...]
Is there a particular reason to choose Eclipse instead of Android Studio? Google is pushing its weight on the latter with their Eclipse+ADT combo being essentially on life support (and for good reason since Android Studio provides a vastly better experience).

Moreover, the next version of Android Studio will include C/C++ support based on JetBrains' CLion that will cover development with the NDK.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#213

Post by DCoder »

bluedino wrote: post #65
protomyth wrote: post #19

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." They stopped selling $49.95 compilers with IDEs and tried to be an enterprise company. People still buy IDEs and compilers. If they had kept doing what they were doing…

They also sold $299 and $499 compilers It's weird thinking we used to pay for compilers

> It's weird thinking we used to pay for compilers

People still do. For example, Intel sells several compilers: https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-compilers

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#214

Post by vbezhenar »

Delphi was very popular in post-USSR countries. But very few people bought it. Probably 90% used illegal copies. I guess most people didn't even realize it, because they bought it on CD and paid $2 for it.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#215

Post by benihana »

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".

You found me out! My preferred environment set up is nothing more than machismo directed at you, a complete stranger. If only I'd had the humility to try an IDE, I could have been enlightened

My eyes hurt from rolling them so hard at your comment.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#216

Post by mahmud »

kriro wrote: post #211
voidfunc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone should tell JetBrains the whole IDE market is dead.

Slightly off topic but I think they would be a great acquisition target for Google. Acquire, open source, push hard. I think there's tremendous strategic advantage in providing the goto tools for programmers. Could be well worth giving up a nice revenue stream, too. [it's similar to providing scholarships and other "early access" recruiting measures]

Please don't! IntelliJ is both perfect, and very affordable. Google will only ruin it by neglecting for a few years, before shuttering it down.

JetBrains, stick to what you do best.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#217

Post by izacus »

MichaelCrawford wrote: post #209
_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…

I regard Eclipse as a tool of the Devil. I'll be taking up Android again soon. Every time I try I find Eclipse giving me the goatse but now I'm going to use TextWrangler and Ant.

Well you're lucky that Eclipse has essentially been deprecated as an Android IDE.

Also Ant? Gradle and Maven are significantly more versatile and better supported for Android development (with Gradle being a first-class citizen now) and I honestly don't advise you to torture yourself with Ant.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#218

Post by to3m »

kzhahou wrote: post #145
atilaneves wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've had reasonable success with company mode and rtags for C/C++. Fairly straightforward to set up and reasonably accurate. I'd hesitate to call it streets ahead of even Xcode, let alone Visual Studio, but it does roughly what you'd hope for, without too much hassle. Definitely worth turning off company mode's complete-as-you type functionality, though...

After 9 years of using emacs, I still don't find it unambiguously better than Visual Studio for working with C/C++. The text editing is a lot better in emacs, but the code browsing/completion is not - and for large, multi-person projects I've always found the code browsing/completion functionality more important. You can always load files into emacs for one-off operations if you need to do something in particular.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#219

Post by thawkins »

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,…

CLion is only a few months old and can be considered to be a 1.0 release, its already growing more and more capability on each minor update.

I use PhpStorm, cLion and PyCharm, and im happy to pay for them, the editor itself is very high quality and having common tools across all the 3 languages i use is great. If only they did a "golang" IDE.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#220

Post by slrz »

tomjen3 wrote: post #187
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?

Refactoring but also code completion (which means you don't have to worry about remembering if the method is add or push) etc. And yes I know those I work with do, because we work on the same codebase and I see their commits.

If you don't even know the name of the function you want to call, how likely is it that you're aware of its constraints and failure modes?

But then, that's probably why those IDEs ship with sophisticated debuggers, right? ☺

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