Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

accu.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 113 posts

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#101

Post by Delphiza »

ivanhoe wrote: post #100

I keep saying this every time Delphi is mentioned, but it definitely deserves the praises: Borland Delphi had the best and the most useful documentation/help system that I ever used - and those were times before Google or even access to Internet for many of us, so reading manuals played a huge role in learning.

I remember my Delphi manuals being quite grimy. They were always on hand and I could find something very quickly. It enabled me to get stuff done without any outside help. Windows help files were also good.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#102

Post by Delphiza »

I started my career using Delphi and was part of the local community. Two of us worked on support for Borland products at the local distributor - I went to do more development and he joined the local Borland sales team. I was often attending product launches, and presented a few times myself. I recall presenting creating ActiveX controls in Deplhi, using a plugin, in front of an applauding crowd, probably about 2 years before VB could do the same.

Data binding to client-server databases was a big deal at the time, and data-bound controls such as grids and TreeViews (which we all thought were the future) were pretty cool. It was an exciting and productive time to build data-based (enterprisey) apps that customers and users loved.

I remember when Borland launched C++ Builder, which was C++ using the Delphi component library (VCL) and IDE. Everyone was very excited during the demo until build and run (F9?) when compiling started and in the demo, in front of a couple of hundred people, my friend had to talk for a couple of minutes until the app ran - something that would have taken seconds in Delphi.

In it's day, Delphi was pretty cool.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#103

Post by ddmf »

I started using Delphi back in the early 90s because I needed to send a "catalogue on a floppy" to customers of my parents.

At the time I'd used VB but the runtime was the size of a floppy on its own, and the catalogue data pushed it over the size. I remember reading that Delphi didn't require a runtime and that was that.

I still use Delphi for LOB apps - so very quick to design a user interface and have a working program ready to roll out, for example so transport can update their haulier quickly, or the accounting software has a shoddy smtp implementation that doesn't play well with our spam appliance so we create a tool that fires statements via mapi and let outlook deal with retries.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#104

Post by malkia »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #89
msla wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I started with Turbo Pascal 3, Moved to 4, 4.5, 5, 6 then Delphi. Somewhere in there moved to "C" and then "C++". I never understand why people use "C" as opposed to C. Does anyone use "Pascal" as opposed to Pascal?

If you’re going to quote C please note that you should be using single quotes: ‘C’

lol, next time I decide to back-quote C - I'll do it this way - hehehe

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#105

Post by bombela »

smokel wrote: post #53
malkia wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the demo coders that I followed (I wanted to become one, but never did anything significant there), and demo docs were done using Pascal. Eastern europeans (like myself) seemed to prefer it more for some reasons. TSR applications while a bit large than pure .asm were possible!

When working on demo effects, I found it extremely important to have lightning fast edit-compile-run cycles. Before interactive demo editing tools became a thing, we had to modify code and recompile it to see anything. With Turbo Pascal (or TASM for that matter) you'd have results in under a second. Every now and then your demo would crash, but having set up AUTOEXEC.BAT to start Turbo Pascal, you'd be back in your e…

You are not alone. Though we are not many.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#106

Post by treprinum »

fmxexpress wrote: post #90
treprinum wrote: post #63

If RAD Studio/C++ Builder allowed building Linux desktop apps, I would have likely bought the architect edition. VCL is so much faster to develop than any other framework.

It does. The FMX framework compiles to Android, iOS, macOS, Linux, and Windows. Single codebase single UI.

This is what I see on Embarcadero Linux C++ dev page:

"However, for Linux, you cannot create the visual VCL and FireMonkey applications."

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#107

Post by timbit42 »

sph wrote: post #96
HumblyTossed wrote: post #48

Pascal is objectively verbose. But there's something very aesthetically pleasing about the blockiness of it.

As someone that grew up on C, I always found Pascal positively brutalist with its BEGIN and END blocks, instead of using the more nimble braces. These days I recognise the immense potential it had, and lament the fact that I never had the chance to learn it properly. My path was Borland Turbo C++, VB6, VC++6 then I moved to the Linux world.

Modula-2, Ada and Oberon removed most of the BEGINs except the one between variable declaration and the start of the code.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#108

Post by fuzztester »

rahen wrote: post #68
unsubstantiated wrote: post #62

Perhaps unknown to the HN community is that C# periodically gets Delphi features reintroduced in it in one way or another. More recently, C# 9 and 10 have returned the concept of `records` (preferably immutable objects) along with the `with` keyword for making copies with some of the properties changed from the source to the dest object. It has been an interesting decade watching HN metaphorically (and sometimes lite…

Well, Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of C#, is also the creator of Delphi.

I heard he also worked a lot on .NET, maybe a key role. Google.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#109

Post by fuzztester »

pjmlp wrote: post #36
mike_hearn wrote: post #14

The no-circular-dependencies rule was a huge pain though. It allowed the compiler to be very fast (along with it basically not optimizing), but no other language has copied this because combined with weak to non-existent refactoring tools it was just a constant pain to be hitting this limitation whilst developing. Sure, if you're an architecture god who plans out all their internal interfaces in advance on paper it w…

> The no-circular-dependencies rule was a huge pain though. It allowed the compiler to be very fast (along with it basically not optimizing), but no other language has copied this C++20 Modules, .NET Assemblies, D modules, Ada packages, and plenty of other othes. Also, Turbo Pascal did indeed allow for circular dependencies between units, as long as the related uses statements were written in the implementation secti…

IIRC, pre-Object Pascal Pascals had a "forward" declaration using which you could call a function or procedure before defining it, as long as it was defined somewhere below in the program. I don't remember if it supported circular dependencies or not.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#110

Post by fuzztester »

timbit42 wrote: post #107
sph wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that grew up on C, I always found Pascal positively brutalist with its BEGIN and END blocks, instead of using the more nimble braces. These days I recognise the immense potential it had, and lament the fact that I never had the chance to learn it properly. My path was Borland Turbo C++, VB6, VC++6 then I moved to the Linux world.

Modula-2, Ada and Oberon removed most of the BEGINs except the one between variable declaration and the start of the code.

But they kept the ENDs?
Post reply on HN