24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today • Hacker News Board

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#111

Post by softgrow » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 11:15 AM UTC

the_trapper wrote: post #4

helloworld wrote: post #3

I forgot that Delphi was sort of a mash-up of Visual Basic and Pascal. Two great tastes, I guess. Are there contemporary products -- for building mobile and/or web apps -- that are similarly easy to use?

You should check out Lazarus. It's basically open source Delphi and cross platform, write once, compile anywhere. http://www.lazarus-ide.org

And lazarus (ie. free Pascal) will compile Turbo Pascal code without a lot of effort. Was quite amazed to resurrect a discrete event simulation I first wrote on VAX Pascal, ported to Turbo Pascal (and wrote my own replacement to the FORTRAN SPURT libraries) and then used a fair bit till about 1990. Fired it up (from the 5 1/4 disks copied some years ago) and had it running in a few minutes, except that it had a range error that I oddly never spotted with Turbo Pascal that had to be fixed first. (And my link with Delphi, applied for a job, didn't get it but they saw Pascal on my resume and said, we'll we've got some Delphi code that needs extending...)

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#112

Post by dublo7 » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 11:15 AM UTC

Svip wrote: post #67

For almost 11 years now, I've been working professionally with Delphi. And it would be wrong to say it's been a smooth ride. There's nothing wrong - per say - with Object Pascal. Or rather, it's not worse than C++, but Delphi - i.e. the library and IDE - is what's lacking behind. It was definitely cutting edge in the mid-90s, but it has not managed to keep with the times. Most Delphi developers rely on Indy, a third…

I just took a job taking over for a retiring guy in a factory and he wrote everything in vb6 and ladder logic which I swear looks exactly like Delphi. Ladder logic itself is annoying as hell to work with but I do like the little bits of Delphi mixed in for the complicated math stuff.

The other guy wrote everything in gcode macros using notepad.

Lots of memories though. Giant Enterprise applications we created 20 years ago.

Have to admit I really prefer go and rust and python though. I think I still have all those Dr Dobbs in my basement too. :)

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#113

Post by cubano » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 11:19 AM UTC

gattilorenz wrote: post #90

Marco Cantu's (the author of this blog) books on Delphi are/were a great resource for learning the language. Btw, his website is under heavy load right now (probably the HN hug?), and this is the error I got: Error in page: /blog/2019-february-24-years-delphi.html Error Class: EListError Error Message: List index out of bounds (-1) Suggesting that the webserver is written in Delphi... that's dedication :)

Wow..that error message is an ultimate blast-from-the-past.

How appropo it's a website that's throwing it now.

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#114

Post by xxxxxxxx » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 11:23 AM UTC

Any mention of Delphi always brings back fond memories of my first job. We were doing amazing things with Clipper at the time, with a bit of Turbo Pascal on the side. Then windows took root and the world opened up with promises from Visual Objects and Dephi - but VB ended up the winner and that was the end of that.

We would play with Delphi and SmallTalk just for fun and there was always a Dephi fanboi around.

Despite these 'primitive' tools we were so much more productive back then - it's quite sad where we have ended up. We would pump out wonderful apps even in the days before we could get our hands on a relational database. dBase files, VSAM files and even trusty CODASYL did the job without any fuss.

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#115

Post by marcocantu » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 11:24 AM UTC

markbnj wrote: post #33

I'm amazed about once every three years when I hear or read something that reminds me delphi is still around. For nostalgia's sake, here's a link to the pre-release review of Delphi 95 that I wrote for Dr. Dobb's back in the day: http://www.drdobbs.com/a-quick-look-at-borlands-delphi-95/18... . Doesn't seem like such a quick look now, but articles were longer back then :).

Nice review ;-) I think I read it, back then

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#116

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 11:29 AM UTC

m0zg wrote: post #106

pjmlp wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the way he went took a bit of talking with former work colleges then working at Microsoft. "Anders Hejlsberg: A craftsman of computer language" - interview https://behindthetech.libsynpro.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-a-c... WinForms was based on J++'s Windows Foundation Classes (WFC), Hejlsberg's first project at Microsoft. Which of course, was based on VCL. That mess is the usual DevDiv vs WinDev, for example I…

I do miss near-instantaneous builds on late 90's hardware (!). Much of that was Pascal with its single pass compiler. Productivity-wise that was indispensable.

I have found home on .NET/Java as the best approximation of it, but do agree it could be better.

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#117

Post by ido » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 11:32 AM UTC

berkut wrote: post #78

ido wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be misremembering but the early visual basics exported even heavier results.

I think you were - I remember the .exes were much smaller, but they weren't self-contained/stand-alone, so you needed to make sure msvb*4.dll (can't remember what it was exactly) was on the system you wanted to run it on, and it was > 1.4 MB, so you couldn't fit both the small .exe and the runtime .dll on a floppy disk...

It was probably the combined size I recall then.

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#118

Post by wila » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 11:36 AM UTC

Svip wrote: post #88

amenod wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the $1000 price tag is totally wrong. I would never pay that kind of money for an IDE unless it was _really_ better than anything else. But this means: - the language has huge community (so I'm not stuck with a dying language) - it allows me to do anything (huge extensibility) Unfortunately it is difficult to change the pricing model once you have existing clients. On one hand they are the only ones paying fo…

The pricing model is the main reason newer people are not getting into Delphi. This is why they tried to lure people with iOS and Android capabilities. But when there are alternatives that are free, why bother? Yes, Delphi has a Community Edition now (which is free), but the fact that are excluded from a large portion of the library, because you cannot afford it, is always going to alienate some people. And it is alw…

Yes, thank goodness for FreePascal/Lazarus.

Also have the Professional Edition and would update if only they took the macOS platform seriously. Again with this update, like the previous few, there are zero improvements for macOS.

Really regret to ever have invested any time (and money as I bought several updates) into their FireMonkey platform. It looks bad on macOS for not using native controls and it looks bad on Windows because the fonts are blurry.

With macOS only being 64 bits around the corner and openGL being declared end of life, one would expect to see some movement or improvements. Nope.

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#119

Post by wila » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 11:39 AM UTC

Svip wrote: post #98

marcocantu wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Delphi has a Community Edition now (which is free), but the fact that are excluded from a large portion of the library" That's not really the case. With Delphi Community edition you get support for 4 operating systems, VCL and FireMonkey, it only lacks access to Enterprise databases like Oracle and some of the multi-tier architectures. Community has a large percentage (80%+) of the features...

You are correct, saying 'large portion of the library' was a mistake. But as I remember, you don't have access to the VCL source code with the Community Edition. The feature matrix says that this is 'limited in Community', whatever that means. We wanted to do MongoDB connections, which comes with FireDAC. But that's only available in the Enterprise Edition. So we ended up rewriting TMongoWire[0] to fit our needs. I a…

Oh FireDAC is no longer available for Professional version either? Geez.. really not going to lay down $3k for an EE.

How is that "professional" if you cannot even read/write to sqlite.

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#120

Post by agumonkey » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 11:45 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #83

int_19h wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extreme skeumorphism a la Mac sometime ago is also undesirable, though. You want them to look just close enough to trigger recognition, everything above that is cognitive overhead.

> Extreme skeumorphism a la Mac sometime ago is also undesirable, though Mac never had extreme skeumorphism. Extreme skeumorphism would be like the common case of DVD player apps made to look real-life DVD players (with all the frustrating LCD-like text displays and tiny cryptic buttons). It's not about having 3d looking buttons, or having faux-leather on your Notes app, which are the kinds of things Apple did.

faux-leather falls into abusive skeu IMO