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

I miss Delphi

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 194 posts

Re: I miss Delphi

#161

Post by jbverschoor »

hboon wrote: post #95
acqq wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried to use VAJava at that time (middle nineties of the previous century)? Or maybe you were involved in producing it, or simply like Smalltalk? "As mentioned before, VAJava is written in SmallTalk. As expected, the environment is not going to set any speed records for Java performance" "I used the JGL benchmarks to test the performance of the Java virtual machine. When running under VAJava, the benchmarks…

I only have experience with VA Smalltalk and VA Java. I used their WebSphere suite of products years later. > I've tried something from VisualAge at that time and it was a pure catastrophe. My conclusion was that it was bought only by the enterprises who decided to force their developers to "use IBM" no matter what. On the contrary, VAS and VAJ was one of the most non-IBM-like products, compared to say Rational Rose…

VA became Eclipse

Re: I miss Delphi

#162

Post by lj3 »

TimJYoung wrote: post #114
lj3 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't Canvas need more advanced text handling for that to be practical? I know that's a big reason canvas based frameworks never took off.

The problem with using the canvas functionality for everything is that it's an all-or-nothing proposition, and you end up having to write a lot of stuff that is already handled by the browser, or can only be handled by the browser (think bi-directional text/NLS issues).

I don't think that's a problem, personally. Something like canvas should be an all-or-nothing proposition. There's very little overlap between what you need for content-based static web pages and applications that just happen to run on the web.

The problem is canvas wasn't designed to be that all-or-nothing alternative to the DOM. It was designed as an alternative to the flash player for html5 games. As a result, it lacks several features that are needed to display generic content, the most prominent of these features being proper (and easy!) font rendering.

I suppose you could build your own advanced font rendering engine (I think Flipboard did exactly that), but that's more work and risk than most companies or even individuals are prepared to take these days. And you are right; creating your own would cause you to re-create a lot of stuff that's already handled by the browser, like font highlighting, copy/paste, etc.

Re: I miss Delphi

#163

Post by Odoth »

spangry wrote: post #79
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #67

While I don't necessarily want a Delphi-like thing for Web development, I do want a Delphi-like thing for developing GUI desktop applications. So far I've tried out a few things, but for some reason they don't "feel" the same as Delphi did. Maybe it's because I'm older and have moved on to different tools, or maybe it's because I haven't made the time to properly invest in these. Anyways, here's what I've played with…

I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but just today I was thinking about how I miss Visual Basic 6... Such a great IDE for slapping together a crummy GUI with buttons, textboxes and labels all slightly misaligned :) I'd love to have something similar for Python.

Best approximation I've found is PyQt/PySide with Qt Designer. My template projects:

https://bitbucket.org/Odoth/pyqt5-template

https://bitbucket.org/Odoth/pyside-template

Re: I miss Delphi

#164

Post by acqq »

pjmlp wrote: post #159
acqq wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you remember why it felt that way? Yes: I've really enjoyed using Turbo Pascal in eighties and earned for living developing using Borland products in the early nineties. I've received VA for C++ to evaluate its suitability. After I've installed it it crashed almost on every click, before I was able to even try something usable. Before it would crash, it would be also quite slow to do anything. In short, not comp…

From your description I would assume you got to use the version where IBM tried to create a Smalltalk/Lisp Machine experience for C++, similar to Lucid's Energize C++, which was so resource demanding that IBM gave up on it. Nowadays we have Apple and Microsoft returning to the idea of using databases to model C++ on the IDEs.

Here's one guy writing about VA C++ of that time:

http://www.tarma.com/articles/1996sep.htm

"Let’s not beat around the bush: VisualAge for C++ for Windows is a disaster as far as I am concerned. It is by far the most anti-productive environment I ever came across, C++ compilers or otherwise."

"The wizard-like approach for project configuration takes you through a number of tabbed dialog pages à la OS/2 (with spiral binders and all that), and they simply look gross on the Windows platforms. What’s worse, elementary options such as a Browse button to navigate to a project directory are missing."

"A static library is not among the options as I found during one of my tests, but for the ones that are, you sometimes wish you’d never started in the first place."

Etc. I also remember it looked visually weird. And that it didn't do what I expected an IDE to do. He describes that and also some strange manual steps.

Another guy, later version:

http://www.edm2.com/index.php/VisualAge_C%2B%2B_4.0_Review

"Installing VAC4 can range from a trouble free walk in the park to something akin to being in the first wave landing on Omaha beach. I have installed the OS/2 and NT versions on multiple machines with varying, mostly good, results. However there are some really nasty horror stories in the news groups about installs going awry. In my experience installation problems seem to revolve around four issues:

VAC4 is very picky about hardware. It will complain or not run on a machine that is seemly running everything else just fine. I've run into this more with OS/2 than with Windows."

"Once you get VAC installed there is one fix pack for version 4 and two fix packs for version 3.6 that you need to install which take care of a number of bugs. The fix pack installation also uses Feature Install. Did I mention that Feature Install really stinks?"

I'm sure I haven't had "fix packs."

Re: I miss Delphi

#165

Post by i336_ »

diamondo25 wrote: post #146
jhoechtl wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was called Dreamweaver

Oh the days of WYSIWYG HTML editors. I still find websites that have the Dreamweaver change-image-on-hover JavaScript. They still work on older browsers though...

  MM_preloadImages()

Re: I miss Delphi

#166

Post by i336_ »

paxcoder wrote: post #154
codr4life wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That early experience gradually got me motivated enough to learn more powerful tools. These days, Common Lisp ( https://github.com/codr4life/cl4l ) is my preferred tool for most problems; but I'm gradually learning to like Forth as an embedded DSL ( https://github.com/codr4life/lifoo ) and might be convinced to write C ( https://github.com/codr4life/libc4life ) under the right circumstances. I swore early on to never…

Don't know how to put this... The tech/tools you enumerate give me the impression that your problems are not directly related to (commercial) software development.

If I was ever asked "why are you sitting around on the computer all day instead of going and doing something productive", I'd say that I was gaining exposure and experience. Limiting that exposure means less of a general ability to easily orient yourself when dropped into unfamiliar circumstances or situations.

Driving around randomly uses gas and contributes to maintenance costs, but gives you an irreplaceable spatial idea of your environment that you can't get from scrabbling through a directory, and which you definitely can't absorb from Google Maps or a GPS.

I only grasped these ideas quite recently, and have been rather motivating to get me to learn more about the academic aspects of CompSci.

Re: I miss Delphi

#167

Post by i336_ »

TimJYoung wrote: post #94

I hope that isn't considered too much self-promotion, but it's on topic. You can have what you want with our product, Elevate Web Builder. It creates single-page web applications in a Delphi-like IDE: http://www.elevatesoft.com/products?category=ewb&type=web (examples at the bottom) We're releasing version 2.06 shortly, and it has much-improved designer drawing performance and design-time/run-time layout performance.…

I had a quick look and decided to try the audio player. The volume control isn't draggable. Also, I was a bit baffled at the framework's decision to inline the page font, which is unlikely to change.

It looks like you're using your own HTTP server solution which doesn't seem to have caching, so all content is being redownloaded each visit. ETags and Last-Modified are very easy to implement, FWIW. (Note: I say that from the standpoint of reassurance, not insult!)

This seems kind of interesting, but my immediate concerns are interoperability with plain JS and how rapidly blocking issues are resolved since this isn't open source.

I'm very curious to see what HN would make of this system; have you ever posted it? Maybe that could be considered after the TreeView component and a TodoMVC example were available.

Note that I'm not dissing this at all. It's clear to me that this has a niche of people that are very happy and productive using this because it lets them reuse knowledge they gained years ago. (I've looked at Pascal a bit, but never really played with it. Lazarus is somewhere on my todo list, just to get a feel for things.)

Re: I miss Delphi

#168

Post by flukus »

diamondo25 wrote: post #146
jhoechtl wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was called Dreamweaver

Oh the days of WYSIWYG HTML editors. I still find websites that have the Dreamweaver change-image-on-hover JavaScript. They still work on older browsers though...

I doubt they work on mobile though, everything was in hard coded dimensions.

Re: I miss Delphi

#169

Post by brynlewis »

Svip wrote: post #30

I work with Delphi professionally. And we maintain a code base of about 150,000 lines of Pascal and about 300,000 lines of T-SQL (written to work in both Sybase and Microsoft SQL). Delphi may be easy, but it's not simple. Once you get into the meat of things, Delphi's ecosystem truly becomes a limitation. Delphi's main drawback is its lack of library availability. If you are in the marked for modern technology, using…

Have you seen http://realthinclient.com ?

Easy, fast Delphi based web server. No affiliation, just a happy customer.

Re: I miss Delphi

#170

Post by pjmlp »

acqq wrote: post #164
pjmlp wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your description I would assume you got to use the version where IBM tried to create a Smalltalk/Lisp Machine experience for C++, similar to Lucid's Energize C++, which was so resource demanding that IBM gave up on it. Nowadays we have Apple and Microsoft returning to the idea of using databases to model C++ on the IDEs.

Here's one guy writing about VA C++ of that time: http://www.tarma.com/articles/1996sep.htm "Let’s not beat around the bush: VisualAge for C++ for Windows is a disaster as far as I am concerned. It is by far the most anti-productive environment I ever came across, C++ compilers or otherwise. " "The wizard-like approach for project configuration takes you through a number of tabbed dialog pages à la OS/2 (with spiral…

Yes that was the one.

It was just too advanced for its time, and as I mentioned, Apple and Microsoft are exploring this path for their C++ IDEs.

Post reply on HN