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Why did Borland fail?

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Re: Why did Borland fail?

#221

Post by tomjen3 »

douche wrote: post #202
tomjen3 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A license for IntelliJ for a company is currently 499 euro. Admitably it still gets you much more than JBuilder would have - including support for 7 or so additional languages - but it is not even close to cheap. If you are buying for yourself, then it is 199 euro which is less than half the price (although that doesn't include VAT).

That seems really high... The last time I reupped my personal IntelliJ license it was about $100 USD.

I got then straight of their website, but 100 USD is probably what it costs to renew a license.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#222

Post by iolothebard »

reality_czech wrote: post #141
autokad wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Apparently you didn't bother keeping up with the trial:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...

It was over IE as well, OMG they included a browser. Laughable now days, right? I used Netscape at the time and never had any issues installing or running it, even when IE hit 95% of the market.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#223

Post by petilon »

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…

Some of Borland's problems had nothing to do with Microsoft. A good example is Borland taking 6 months to rewrite Quattro in object-oriented code. They did this in the middle of a heated battle with Microsoft Excel, where both companies were releasing major new features every 6 months. As awesome as OOP is, it is not a user-visible feature. Being MIA for 6 months while engineers OOP'd the code may have cost them the battle. You can read some of this in this story (search for 'object oriented'): http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/29/business/the-executive-com...

Some of Borland's problems were indeed Microsoft's doing. OWL vs. MFC, for example. OWL was the first object-oriented library for Windows, but MFC eventually won because MFC was always first to support Windows features. OWL lagged behind because Borland did not have access to in-development versions of Windows.

Borland applications such as Quattro Pro also suffered because Borland did not have access to in-development features of Windows such as OLE 2.0, and because of Microsoft bundling productivity applications into an Office "suite".

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#224

Post by realharo »

slrz wrote: post #220
tomjen3 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? ☺

It's a good thing then that those IDEs can show the method's documentation right next to the autocomplete list as you're browsing through it.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#225

Post by wtbob »

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…

Do you realise that emacs supports 'intelligent, realtime code analysis'? I program in Go, and I have auto-completion and documentation.

Emacs is more extensible, and more easily extensible, than Eclipse.

Yes, an IDE is pretty nice for a particular kind of horrible enterprise coding: the sort where no-one understands the system, where everything's horribly over-architected and where, yes, ultra-fast auto-completion is necessary to get anything done. But…why live like that? There're interesting problems and fun environments where one doesn't need to live in that kind of hell.

emacs can handle that, but you have to start asking yourself if it even makes sense to do. A lot of times, those IDEs are just managing spurious complexity, not actually helping build something great.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#226

Post by wtbob »

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.

The Go stuff works pretty well.

I never needed it in Python, because Python libraries are so clean and orthogonal.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#227

Post by throwawaykf05 »

jwr wrote: post #151
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". 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 Clo…

In 2015, do you think most people are using emacs or vim to work with Java or with a Lisp? I think this point stands for the vast, vast majority of people using emacs and vim.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#228

Post by mschaef »

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 more than a little ironic that you claim Emacs/vim users use their tool out of 'harcdore, programmer machismo', and you're doing basically the same thing in the opposite direction by accusing them of being unprofessional.

For me, I've used both IDE's and plain ordinary text editors for close to 30 years (the first IDE being QuickBasic 4), and tend to find that IDE's get in the way more often than not. My personal software designs tend to use single components for single functions, so the additional complexities of an IDE's second compiler, second build tool, second VCS front end are less than appealing to me. That said, I've gotten a lot of use in the last 24 hours out of code refactoring the the IntelliJ debugger, so I think the honest answer is to use both approaches if you like.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#229

Post by wolfgke »

frik wrote: post #194
tomjen3 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.supp…

To clear this dispute in a scientific way, I created a word document in Word 2010 (Windows 7) with a badly drawn graphics and exported it to HTML:

> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B654HhgdE0ZTRktjSERNS3pxd00...

Note that the generated HTML5 source code

  - contains VML code
  - will not render correctly in any modern browser
  - If you want to be able to render it in IE11, you have to press F12 (Developer tools)
    and change from "Edge" to compatibility to version 7 (or even 5) of the IE engine. 
    Then it will be drawn "correctly".

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#230

Post by ExpiredLink »

brianwawok wrote: post #87
ExpiredLink wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, JBuilder cost almost $500 back then. Eclipse initially wasn't better but open (for extensions) and gratis.

I pay approx that for Idea. So people will pay that if the product is good.

I've never seen IntelliJ IDEA in an enterprise environment. Eclipse is good enough and gratis.
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