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Why did Borland fail?

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Re: Why did Borland fail?

#241

Post by d4rti »

laumars wrote: post #155
Ecio78 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rende…

I once rewrote around 200-300 lines of VB using the WinInet gear into a 20-30 line Perl script with WWW::Mechanize. VB's HTTP stuff was terrible.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#242

Post by laumars »

d4rti wrote: post #241
laumars wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rende…

I once rewrote around 200-300 lines of VB using the WinInet gear into a 20-30 line Perl script with WWW::Mechanize. VB's HTTP stuff was terrible.

Indeed. So much so that I found it was easier just writing my own HTTP classes on top of Winsock.

But to be fair, we are talking the 90s and HTTP wasn't as ingrained into technologies as it is today. Heck, back then parameterised SQL hadn't been invented; Internet Explorer was basically the only browser (Netscape had largely been crushed and Opera was non-free); most computers still shipped DOS (if just as a bootloader); and classic ASP was a popular server side framework. So it's easy to be critical with hindsight but the whole ecosystem was still maturing.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#243

Post by laumars »

eru wrote: post #192
laumars wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That was my point.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#244

Post by atombender »

mdpopescu wrote: post #124
atombender wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me (Delphi programmer until around 2001), there were several more important factors in the eventual failure of Delphi. First, at the time Borland (or, briefly, Inprise) tried to move into the "enterprise" market, with expensive, nebulously defined "middleware" products like Midas. This is why they aggressively pursued failed tech like CORBA. It was a disaster, and had nothing to offer those who wanted to get stuf…

I agree with everything you're saying here except for one thing: Delphi was amazing for COM programming. In fact, it took me years of reading complaints about how complicated COM programming was (and thinking everybody is nuts) before I first saw an example of COM done with C++ and realized what people meant. We were doing a ton of COM / COM+ programming in Delphi 5 and we've never had any problems.

Having done a ton of COM programming in Delphi, the problem wasn't that it didn't work that well — the language integration was fantastic, and things like QueryInterface and AddRef/Release were done for you — but the support wasn't quite good enough.

The typelib editor, for example, was atrocious in Delphi 4 (maybe it got better in later versions), and if you wanted to use a COM-based library (MAPI, TAPI, OLE DB, etc.) you couldn't do it without the headers. Since so much of COM came from Microsoft, it felt like fighting a losing battle against the official way of doing COM programming (Visual C++, at the time). Ironically COM programming seemed much worse in VC++, given the lack of language integration.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#245

Post by tajen »

tomjen3 wrote: post #221
douche wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only a renewal for personal license. Companies are not allowed to reimburse or pay a personal license. I testify the 1-year initial license for IntelliJ is $499.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#246

Post by MichaelCrawford »

izacus wrote: post #217
MichaelCrawford wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually I'd far prefer to use a Makefile.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#247

Post by MichaelCrawford »

lvillani wrote: post #212
MichaelCrawford wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 J…

I didn't know about Android Studio, I'll give it a try.

I actually like IDEs quite a lot, what I don't like are IDEs like netbeans, eclipse, visual studio or xcode.

I loved codewarrior absolutely to death, I was heavily into thinkc, the first development tool I ever bought with my own money was lightspeedc which fit on a floppy.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#248

Post by lemming »

Htsthbjig wrote: post #179
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"." 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 k…

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.

I develop Cursive, an IDE based on IntelliJ for Clojure code. Its completion and navigation are categorically better than Emacs's, even for a language that supposedly has one of the best levels of support under Emacs.

To say that Emacs is automatically better than everything else is pure Stockholm syndrome.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#249

Post by harkyns_castle »

MichaelCrawford wrote: post #247
lvillani wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 J…

I didn't know about Android Studio, I'll give it a try. I actually like IDEs quite a lot, what I don't like are IDEs like netbeans, eclipse, visual studio or xcode. I loved codewarrior absolutely to death, I was heavily into thinkc, the first development tool I ever bought with my own money was lightspeedc which fit on a floppy.

Metrowerks Codewarrior has fond memories for me too (although I have never had a problem with Eclipse aside from bloated J2EE bundles like WSAD etc. It's easy to set it up to be quick and unobstrusive I've found).

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#250

Post by dlitz »

iolothebard wrote: post #222
reality_czech wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Um, wow, ok. Look, you also have to consider the information that was revealed during the discovery phase of the lawsuit, not just what the DoJ decided to actually pursue.

Oh, and there has been more than one lawsuit to keep up with. A lot more than one lawsuit:

http://groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20050101071006...

It's really hard to describe the full impact of what it was like to have everyone in the industry working under the constant fear of getting targeted by Microsoft for more than a decade, and the way that this shaped the market and technology as a whole. Summing it up as "LOL they bundled a browser" betrays a really massive ignorance.

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