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Why did Borland fail?

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Re: Why did Borland fail?

#251

Post by reality_czech »

dlitz wrote: post #250
iolothebard wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 indu…

Kids on HN don't understand what it was like when Microsoft was the only software company in town with a future. Kind of like Standard Oil back in the Rockefeller days. Apple was dying, Google and Facebook didn't exist, Netscape had its "air supply" cut off and Borland, Delphi, and IBM looked like they were headed for the trash can of history. It's like trying to explain the Soviet Union to someone who was born in the 1990s. It just seems like a bunch of old men with bad haircuts, how scary could that possibly be?

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#252

Post by Ecio78 »

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 am fully aware VB and VB.NET are two different languages :) Actually at the time I am talking about, .NET has not been invented yet (wikipedia says 2012), and it was invented by the guy cited in this thread as ex chief dev of Delphi:

My post was just to say that Delphi had quite advanced TCP/IP components options compared to other languages of that time (I cited VB because it was supposed to be the "easiest" language of the period)

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#253

Post by mdpopescu »

atombender wrote: post #244
mdpopescu wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, et…

Ah, I've never used Delphi 4; I skipped from 2 to 5 and then 7 (the last one I've used). I've never had problems with the typelib editor in D5.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#254

Post by laumars »

Ecio78 wrote: post #252
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 am fully aware VB and VB.NET are two different languages :) Actually at the time I am talking about, .NET has not been invented yet (wikipedia says 2012), and it was invented by the guy cited in this thread as ex chief dev of Delphi: My post was just to say that Delphi had quite advanced TCP/IP components options compared to other languages of that time (I cited VB because it was supposed to be the "easiest" langua…

> Actually at the time I am talking about, .NET has not been invented yet (wikipedia says 2012)

I assume you mean 2002? FYI .NET was available to some developers before 2002, that was just the first non-beta release :)

> I am fully aware VB and VB.NET are two different languages...I cited VB because it was supposed to be the "easiest" language of the period

I mistook your post to reference Visual Basic because I mentioned it in my post where I discussed VB.NET. I say this because opening your post with "actually" suggested you meant your reply as a correction to my comment. So it wasn't clear to me that your post was intended purely as an interesting yet tangential anecdote.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#255

Post by atilaneves »

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 use Emacs to write everything. So, in the last 12 months at least C, C++, D, Haskell, Ruby, and Python. For Python I use rope and jedi. Auto-complete, goto definition and refactoring. For C/C++ I use my own package cmake-ide. As the name implies, it only works for cmake builds. But it does work. Similarly to Python, autocomplete, on-the-fly syntax highlighting, goto-definition, ... For D I use another one of my packages, flycheck-dmd-dub. For Haskell I can't remember now but it'll all very good. For Ruby I use flycheck, rubocop and rsense.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#256

Post by amorphid »

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?

I use pry-byebug most of the time.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#257

Post by dlitz »

reality_czech wrote: post #251
dlitz wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 indu…

Kids on HN don't understand what it was like when Microsoft was the only software company in town with a future. Kind of like Standard Oil back in the Rockefeller days. Apple was dying, Google and Facebook didn't exist, Netscape had its "air supply" cut off and Borland, Delphi, and IBM looked like they were headed for the trash can of history. It's like trying to explain the Soviet Union to someone who was born in th…

I remember the conversations people had back then. You had basically 3 business models if you were going to run a software company. It was something like:

1. Stay so small/niche that Microsoft won't notice or care about you.

2. Avoid selling software as your primary source of income. This is basically a variant of #1.

3. Try to get bought by Microsoft. Ha, just kidding! Everybody knows that Microsoft doesn't buy stuff that's 'Not Innovated Here'.

3. Gamble. Hope you corner your market and extract as much value as possible from that market before Microsoft figures out what you're doing and enters your market. Or (later) C&D's you over some patents they have.

The weird thing is that outside the Bay Area (in some parts of Canada, at least), I still see startups recruiting for a #1-like business model, more-or-less: "The best $SOCIAL_MEDIA iPhone app in $CITY" or whatever. They're not actually afraid of Microsoft anymore, but it's like the mentality didn't go away.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#258

Post by duaneb »

serge2k wrote: post #197
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?

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

Sure, but assumably they do something ASIDE from refactor.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#259

Post by iolothebard »

reality_czech wrote: post #251
dlitz wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 indu…

Kids on HN don't understand what it was like when Microsoft was the only software company in town with a future. Kind of like Standard Oil back in the Rockefeller days. Apple was dying, Google and Facebook didn't exist, Netscape had its "air supply" cut off and Borland, Delphi, and IBM looked like they were headed for the trash can of history. It's like trying to explain the Soviet Union to someone who was born in th…

Lmao kids. I got my first computer in 1983, how about you kid?

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#260

Post by iolothebard »

dlitz wrote: post #250
iolothebard wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 indu…

Laughable. MS was terrified of competition so they always went after competitors. The only reason it was MS instead of IBM is IBM was scared of more government regulation on their business.

Apple could have easily had this market and more if they'd opened up.

Maybe you didn't work as a developer in the 80s. I used Borland, Watcom and many other vendors along with many other OSes as well. Magically in the mid 1990s you could even run something called Linux on your PC.

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