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22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

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Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#111

Post by tazjin »

wtbob wrote: post #94
metachris wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strong point of Electron is easy _cross-platform_ application development and packaging (spits out .exe, .app and Linux binary), with no further dependencies. Ever tried packaging a QT application for Mac, Windows and Linux? I can tell you it's a painful experience, one I don't want to repeat. Also HTML+CSS allows for extremely versatile styling and fine-grained control of appearance.

A weak point, though, is JavaScript — quite possibly the worst popular computer language in history. I honestly think I'd rather starve than write another line of JavaScript again. Even reading JavaScript diffs from other guys on my team is a horrible, terrible experience. It's just a sad, awful, miserable, verbose, broken language. As a compilation target from a better language, I suppose it's mostly acceptable. But…

It's not just that the language is bad, it's also that the ecosystem encourages bloat and terrible implementations with layers of fixes glued on top of each other.

My current main work laptop (a pre-TouchBar generation MBP) can only barely run a "heavy" JS-application like Slack and something like IntelliJ at the same time.

Migrating Slack into an IRC client reduces the CPU & memory footprint of _sending, receiving and displaying text_ by over 90%.

Something went seriously wrong somewhere and we're only going deeper into the hole.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#112

Post by barking »

ealexhudson wrote: post #105
ptero wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO Pascal is a good, clean language and Borland was a top engineering shop that built Delphi as a rapid development tool that supported Windows . At the time there was nothing comparable for Windows development. There was a huge marked for Windows consumer applications and games (Linux was not a household name yet) and very little outside of clumsy Visual Studio to write them. I recall reading at WSJ at the time tha…

They produced Kylix not that long ago - I had an original box set once upon a time. I have no idea why that didn't take off, but it was an excellent environment really.

kylix came out in 2001. That's verging on medieval :)

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#114

Post by tvmalsv »

metachris wrote: post #59
yoodenvranx wrote: post #43

Delphi is still unrivaled when it comes to rapid GUI prototyping in combination with easy deployment. It's much easier than QT/GTK and you usually get a standalone .exe with no external dependencies. I really want to cry when I see the current alternatives... Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this?

The strong point of Electron is easy _cross-platform_ application development and packaging (spits out .exe, .app and Linux binary), with no further dependencies. Ever tried packaging a QT application for Mac, Windows and Linux? I can tell you it's a painful experience, one I don't want to repeat. Also HTML+CSS allows for extremely versatile styling and fine-grained control of appearance.

I haven't tried the new versions, so I don't know how easy it is, but Delphi claims to do easy cross-platform now, too, for Windows, OSX, iOS, and Android.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#115

Post by baq »

barking wrote: post #112
ealexhudson wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They produced Kylix not that long ago - I had an original box set once upon a time. I have no idea why that didn't take off, but it was an excellent environment really.

kylix came out in 2001. That's verging on medieval :)

yeah i remember reading about kylix in a paper magazine.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#116

Post by bartread »

wtbob wrote: post #94
metachris wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strong point of Electron is easy _cross-platform_ application development and packaging (spits out .exe, .app and Linux binary), with no further dependencies. Ever tried packaging a QT application for Mac, Windows and Linux? I can tell you it's a painful experience, one I don't want to repeat. Also HTML+CSS allows for extremely versatile styling and fine-grained control of appearance.

A weak point, though, is JavaScript — quite possibly the worst popular computer language in history. I honestly think I'd rather starve than write another line of JavaScript again. Even reading JavaScript diffs from other guys on my team is a horrible, terrible experience. It's just a sad, awful, miserable, verbose, broken language. As a compilation target from a better language, I suppose it's mostly acceptable. But…

"Worst popular computer language in history." That's a bit strong, isn't it? It certainly has its faults, but so did VB6 (and other BASIC variants, for that matter). PHP gets widely slagged off as well. Does it deserve it? Possibly, to some extent, but people still manage to successfully build useful software with it.

With JavaScript, the problem isn't so much the language (though there are many ways to use and misuse it) as its ubiquity and ease of entry. Because it's so popular it attracts many novice programmers who write terrible code (but that's how we all start). If we're going to have any good, experienced engineers in future then we need those novices now.

If C++, Haskell, Ruby, or Scala were as popular as JavaScript - particularly if one of them were the standard for client-side web programming - there'd be just as much terrible code written in those languages; it would just be differently terrible.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#117

Post by johnhattan »

acqq wrote: post #16

> I'll start blogging on the Delphi language coming back to Linux tomorrow! To taste the cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development today: http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?page=whyuse "Why use Lazarus? No dependencies! With Lazarus you can create programs which do not require any platform dependencies [1]. The result of it is the user of your program does not need to install…

I'd also think "It's $1400 cheaper than Delphi" would be a good selling point.

I started using Turbo Pascal in college when it was $49. Given that Embarcadero Delphi is competing with a lot of stuff that is free and high-quality, I doubt it's got anywhere to go but down from here.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#118

Post by bigtunacan »

wtbob wrote: post #94
metachris wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strong point of Electron is easy _cross-platform_ application development and packaging (spits out .exe, .app and Linux binary), with no further dependencies. Ever tried packaging a QT application for Mac, Windows and Linux? I can tell you it's a painful experience, one I don't want to repeat. Also HTML+CSS allows for extremely versatile styling and fine-grained control of appearance.

A weak point, though, is JavaScript — quite possibly the worst popular computer language in history. I honestly think I'd rather starve than write another line of JavaScript again. Even reading JavaScript diffs from other guys on my team is a horrible, terrible experience. It's just a sad, awful, miserable, verbose, broken language. As a compilation target from a better language, I suppose it's mostly acceptable. But…

Every programming language has it's warts. JavaScript is in a unique position in terms of the level of backwards compatibility it is required to maintain. It integrates some powerful features with it's lisp-y functional style and closures. It's implementation of prototypal inheritence isn't the greatest I've seen, but it's by far the most successful prototype based language and that is something I personally wouldn't mind seeing become more mainstream.

Despite thinking JavaScript itself has some really great qualities; I generally don't think Electron is a great solution for desktop applications. Executables are too large and slow compared to a good old fashioned native application.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#119

Post by mike_hearn »

masterponomo wrote: post #45

I attended a Clipper user group in Atlanta in the mid 1990's, with my dad. He was into Clipper, was trying to get me interested. The Clipper folks were also into Turbo Pascal. A Borland rep was there to give out swag and talk up the imminent release of Borland Delphi. The Clipper crowd was divided--some excited, some not so much. The older guys, like my dad, had come up programming with punched cards and tape drives.…

Hah, that's how I started programming too. A bit of BASIC. Then I graduated to Clipper and Turbo Pascal because that's what my dad used. Then to Delphi 1.0, then 2.0, I think we skipped 3. Delphi 4 was a mess. Quality got pretty variable in the later releases.

Imagine being 14 and trying to understand CORBA.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#120

Post by muyuu »

tluyben2 wrote: post #85
muyuu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today. If it had a resonable price, many people would continue to use it indeterminately. http://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Did you try it? I try it every year (I was a Delphi fan and full time Delphi programmer from Delph-1 to 6) but it is not very good. The Pascal compiler is brilliant and fast but Lazarus itself is unusable every time I try. It often begins by failing to build the basic form until I go through a bunch of steps to fix the install. That's going to put most people off as Delphi never had that issue; it was install-and-go.…

Last time I tried it I did on a virtualbox VM and everything seemed to work.

I don't see anything in your link, by the way.

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