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Delphi's 25th Birthday

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Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#2

Post by peter_d_sherman »

Excerpt:

"I started my coding career using a Turbo Pascal clone for the Commodore Amiga, something called High-Speed Pascal, published by UK based company Hi-Soft."

It would be interesting if an open-source version of this Amiga Turbo Pascal clone - was available somewhere...

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#3

Post by mickeyp »

I loved Delphi. It was amazing. But then they ate their own future by going to the stratosphere with enterprisey tool acquisitions nobody remembers the names of any more; then they fell back down to earth, and flirted with Kylix -- Delphi for linux -- but at a time of great upheaval in the linux desktop world, and it never really took off either.

Meanwhile, the former creator of Delphi had left for MS and created C# that at the time was already beating Delphi at its own game.

By the mid 2000s Delphi was already dead in the water: poor unicode support, no 64-bit compiler, and a language that hadn't innovated much since the 90s.

It's a shame, really. Delphi in the 90s was on its way to rule the world. Only then suddenly it wasn't.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#4

Post by martin_a »

Wow, 25 years. Wasn't onboard right from the start but something like Delphi 4 or 5 when I was in school. Ended that "career" with some cracked version of Delphi 7 Enterprise (obviously one needed the biggest version as a 16 year old!). I have good memories of Delphi, was my start into programming. Nice to see it's still around.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#6

Post by nottorp »

mickeyp wrote: post #3

I loved Delphi. It was amazing. But then they ate their own future by going to the stratosphere with enterprisey tool acquisitions nobody remembers the names of any more; then they fell back down to earth, and flirted with Kylix -- Delphi for linux -- but at a time of great upheaval in the linux desktop world, and it never really took off either. Meanwhile, the former creator of Delphi had left for MS and created C#…

My first paid programming job was Delphi. Worked with 1, 2, 4 and 6 I think. Then it went extremely enterprise. And I'm saying that even though it was used for an accounting application.

RIP. You were great once.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#8

Post by altmind »

mickeyp wrote: post #3

I loved Delphi. It was amazing. But then they ate their own future by going to the stratosphere with enterprisey tool acquisitions nobody remembers the names of any more; then they fell back down to earth, and flirted with Kylix -- Delphi for linux -- but at a time of great upheaval in the linux desktop world, and it never really took off either. Meanwhile, the former creator of Delphi had left for MS and created C#…

I still remember interbase, now called firebird. Of course, sqlite is much more prominent today for an embeded database, but for the times without sqlite...

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#9

Post by altmind »

For those missing Delphi, have you considered VS/C#/Winforms? I gonna tell you than its binaries as portable as Delphi/Kylix(e.g. major platforms covered).

The language is much less annoying (oh how i hated Type and Var sections in the times). The gui programming style can be similar or can be modernized. The designer and component library is vastly improved. Third party components are cheap compared to today's "cloud" prices. There are libs for everything. Its free. Can be compiled to native binaries(not sure this will leave 'experimental'). Feels like a direct replacement to me.

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