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Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

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Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#101

Post by sitkack »

Idera (nee Borland) must be stoked, they potentially just created 1 million new Delphi programmers in a 2nd world country. I'd add a bullet point to the sheet.

* One million Turkish kids

This isn't necessarily corruption. And we have no idea what they paid. The internet is lousy in Turkey, having a stand alone system with documentation, an IDE and a great debugger will work really well in that environment. Pascal is a perfectly fine language.

In my universe they started using Racket and The New Turing Omnibus (for middle school) and then The Little ____ Books [2] and then on to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs [3]

[1] https://racket-lang.org/

[2] http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/books.html

[3] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html https://github.com/sarabander/sicp

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#102

Post by blub »

_v7gu wrote: post #96

Corruption matters aside, I honestly think choosing a non-standard technology is a good move. Reading the news article, you see that the students mentioned are in trade schools. Turkey needs the trade school students to continue doing trades (there's a shortage of tradespeople), so it would make no sense flooding the javascript/c#/python developer market with trade schoolers now thinking they might make lots of more…

Honestly, they could maybe start a desktop app start-up.

The web craze hasn't infected the entire planet (yet), and there's many small companies that require different tools and can't afford the big name packages or they can't find something matching their requirements.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#103

Post by timwaagh »

Pascal isn't necessarily the worst choice to learn programming in. After all, it was designed from the ground up for education and Delphi is one of the few environments around sporting a vb-style GUI creation interface. In high school, when i could barely program i still managed to utilize delphi to run some physics calculations. I suppose Java or C# makes more sense at the college level. But below that when the vast majority arent going to be programmers and the goal is to get them an idea of what programming is about i could think of few superior choices, if any.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#104

Post by blub »

h4l0 wrote: post #9

I really don't want to sound cynical about this great initiative(!) but it saddens me that among many open modern languages and tools, they instead opted for Delphi. I cannot think of a single positive reason behind this decision in 2020. All I can think of is that the people that came to this conclusion are the ones who graduated from Computer Science related studies in ~1998-2004~ and immediately got themselves in…

The only reasonable alternative is Qt, but C++ is more complicated than Pascal.

Assuming they would want to try their hand at making money out of what they learn, they could target the kind of companies which were served by VB6 or FoxPro in the past :)

Anything web-based is ridiculously complicated and has worse performance.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#105

Post by kragen »

non-entity wrote: post #70
revanx_ wrote: post #30

I programmed in Delphi for 8 years, then I switched to FreePascal. Yes, the grass is greener on the other side, and it's also free.

Going to start a project in in FreePascal soon because it seems to be the only [not abandonware] compiler for a high level language that still supports targeting 8086.

Huh, I'm surprised to find that you're right, unless you count NASM. Randall Hyde last updated HLA in 2015 (and it didn't support the 8086 anyway), WalterBright last updated DMC in 2013, and SDCC doesn't support the 8086. But I remember the 8086 as being a lot of needless effort that we had to cope with because it had a large installed base: near, far, and huge pointers, EMS bank switching, shitty TSRs that would stomp your registers, and so on. MS-DOS made it worse.

What are you up to? Something like https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al... where the needless effort is the whole point?

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#106

Post by rolleiflex »

sitkack wrote: post #101

Idera (nee Borland) must be stoked, they potentially just created 1 million new Delphi programmers in a 2nd world country. I'd add a bullet point to the sheet. * One million Turkish kids This isn't necessarily corruption. And we have no idea what they paid. The internet is lousy in Turkey, having a stand alone system with documentation, an IDE and a great debugger will work really well in that environment. Pascal is…

> The internet is lousy in Turkey

Um, what? I just signed up for fiber in Istanbul, lowest plan, 25mbit, at dirt cheap $11 a month — unmetered. Meanwhile my San Francisco apartment, Comcast charges me $67 a month for a 50mbit capped one.

While there is some variance in availability (just like any other country) Turkish infrastructure is generally first-world. It is for political reasons that it gets demoted into the second, but ultimately we’re talking about a place with a $25k~ GDP PPP per person [1]. That’s more than Greece’s, and climbing towards Italy’s.

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/turkey/gdp-per-capita-ppp

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#107

Post by zozbot234 »

levosmetalo wrote: post #95
arghwhat wrote: post #14

This reminds me of a few ( I then found out that they were being taught to use Borland Turbo C . I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its a…

Is that somehow wrong? What was so fundamentally changed in CS that makes teaching C obsolete?

We have Rust now which is a type-safe and memory-safe language. C is totally obsolete.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#108

Post by kragen »

majidazimi wrote: post #24
LeonidasXIV wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is rather not where the world has been going towards in the last decade or so.

The number of small scale desktop applications (like restaurant accounting/billing or tax management) in Turkey or similar markets exceeds all forms of mobile/web apps combined. In my home town in Iran, C# desktop developer is the number one job offer for the last 10-15 years. The market is full of small businesses that need simple desktop apps to run the business.

Why would you want to build a restaurant accounting/billing app as a desktop app instead of a browser app?

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#109

Post by blub »

kragen wrote: post #97
phendrenad2 wrote: post #39

Professional programmers scoff at "old" languages like this, but they forget what it's like to not know the first thing about programming, or what GCC is, or how it's different from Clang, or if you need to install Linux to use it, or if you're making a huge mistake by using C++ instead of Rust, or if maybe Go is better, or why that one person said something about GraphQL, or if you need to install a virtual env for…

> Professional programmers scoff at "old" languages like this Old languages? Delphi is a lot newer than C. C in a mostly modern form dates from about 1977; Delphi is from 1995. If you want to just write code in a box and have it run, maybe you should use http://sketchpad.cc/ or https://jsfiddle.net/ . Or code.labstack.com, intervue.io, codepad, codiva.io, paiza.io, compilr, ideone, onlinegdb, repl.it, rextester, myco…

Or you could use Delphi, install once, deploy on any platform you want, keep your sanity and you not have to worry about anything, including WTF codiva, sequential or leftpad.js are.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#110

Post by non-entity »

kragen wrote: post #105
non-entity wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to start a project in in FreePascal soon because it seems to be the only [not abandonware] compiler for a high level language that still supports targeting 8086.

Huh, I'm surprised to find that you're right, unless you count NASM. Randall Hyde last updated HLA in 2015 (and it didn't support the 8086 anyway), WalterBright last updated DMC in 2013, and SDCC doesn't support the 8086. But I remember the 8086 as being a lot of needless effort that we had to cope with because it had a large installed base: near, far, and huge pointers, EMS bank switching, shitty TSRs that would sto…

Yep, my goal is to write a kernel for an old IBM 5155 I picked up a while back. Mostly for fun
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