Why do people do this to themselves? You can't code in a vacuum. It's about community strength and modernity. If you don't have both you are wasting you time. It's like talking to a island cast away.
Why I Choose Delphi
181–190 of 307 posts
Re: Why I Choose Delphi
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The pricing is just out of this wolrd. You get the impression that they try to squeeze every last penny out of their existing user base. I used to think that about Delphi, various commercial Lisp implementations, etc. But after some time I've changed my view a little. My change is because I realized that Delphi had its chance, and kept on trying as the chance slipped away. No amount of competitive pricing today is…
> No amount of competitive pricing today is going to make a resurgence of Delphi happen. I disagree. Delphi is still great, and with a less tone-deaf it could get very well. Note that Delphi still have a healthy position today: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ (Position 9, above Ruby! and others!) (As much as we can debate about Tiobe and other indexs, is important to note that is still way higher that many will ex…
I think any company that would buy Delphi will agree more with me than with you.
If you're right and companies just can't see that or make it work, can the community do more with Lazarus? I have not played with that so I don't know how good it is.
Re: Why I Choose Delphi
#183Why do people do this to themselves? You can't code in a vacuum. It's about community strength and modernity. If you don't have both you are wasting you time. It's like talking to a island cast away.
What is about community strength? If he's creating applications and enjoys doing it, why does it matter who else is using the same language? Worst case scenario, he can translate libraries from other languages into Object Pascal, but realistically it has a decent-sized community.
I don't see the modernity point, either. Object Pascal has modern features.
Re: Why I Choose Delphi
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No amount of competitive pricing today is going to make a resurgence of Delphi happen. I disagree. Delphi is still great, and with a less tone-deaf it could get very well. Note that Delphi still have a healthy position today: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ (Position 9, above Ruby! and others!) (As much as we can debate about Tiobe and other indexs, is important to note that is still way higher that many will ex…
I think any company that would buy Delphi will agree more with me than with you. If you're right and companies just can't see that or make it work, can the community do more with Lazarus? I have not played with that so I don't know how good it is.
Most companies will ruin any language, specially if you get into the idea that is for sell as in the 90s. No way this could work today.
We (the community) have tell Borland and sub-sequent owners exactly what to do, and have been never been heared.
To see why it failed, read :
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Borland-fail
In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yocam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yocam replied without hesitation "Absolutely."
This is it. Management trade a large and healthy ecosystem chasing the rainbows.
This will fail for sure.
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Lazarus is ok, except that suffer from the same disease of most open source projects: Lack of focus and good funding.
Re: Why I Choose Delphi
#185I've always hated the Delphi ecosystem, awesome IDE, good-enough language, but everything else sucked, specially if you are a young programmer with limited money, you couldn't learn it unless you pirated it, even .NET had a free version. Everything there had a price-tag, from the IDE to the third-party libraries. So yeah, everyone moved on from Delphi, it's currently on palliative care, probably won't die any time so…
http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ has been around since 1999. Not like it's _that_ old, but for technology, it's pretty old.
Re: Why I Choose Delphi
#186Why do people do this to themselves? You can't code in a vacuum. It's about community strength and modernity. If you don't have both you are wasting you time. It's like talking to a island cast away.
How do you know Object Pascal doesn't have a good community?
"Modernity" is not a value in and of itself. This developer seems to be delivering real value with Object Pascal, and demonstrates Object Pascal tools are still being actively developed.
If you have concrete criticisms of Object Pascal, that could lead to some interesting discussion. But your comment, as it stands, adds very little value.
Re: Why I Choose Delphi
#187I've always hated the Delphi ecosystem, awesome IDE, good-enough language, but everything else sucked, specially if you are a young programmer with limited money, you couldn't learn it unless you pirated it, even .NET had a free version. Everything there had a price-tag, from the IDE to the third-party libraries. So yeah, everyone moved on from Delphi, it's currently on palliative care, probably won't die any time so…
Was a different business model from a different time, making money directly off of selling good developer tools. Even Apple and Microsoft charged for their development tools until relatively recently, I believe.
Now open source and vendor tools have completely won that space, and its only possible to profit from developer tools indirectly. So not just Delphi, but the entire associated business model has become irrelevant.
Re: Why I Choose Delphi
#188Why do people do this to themselves? You can't code in a vacuum. It's about community strength and modernity. If you don't have both you are wasting you time. It's like talking to a island cast away.
What is about community strength? If he's creating applications and enjoys doing it, why does it matter who else is using the same language? Worst case scenario, he can translate libraries from other languages into Object Pascal, but realistically it has a decent-sized community. I don't see the modernity point, either. Object Pascal has modern features.
It matters because it affects how many third party libraries are available and the number of other people that can understand and work on your code.
Object Pascal may have modern features, but that doesn't mean it is a modern language - nobody is going to start learning it now. Only people that have known it for years already will use it.
Re: Why I Choose Delphi
#189I still compile a old project in Delphi 7 once every 3 months just to add 5 lines of code, and they pay me monthly for it. It's cheaper than porting the whole system to any other language. It is a project that I've built 8 years ago. Delphi was already a "strange think" on that time, it was declining fast. I think Java killed Delphi - "One codebase for all platforms, even your freezer will have Java!" - this was the…
I wish I could upvote this several times. That's my exact experience as well. I would like more people to experience what was the way of creating software with Delphi, seamless and easy, really closing the loop between creating and the resulting application and then look back at what unnecessary complexity we are dealing with every day when working with software. (nb I think there was a blog somewhere by one of Delph…
I feel similar nostalgia about HyperCard on the Mac.
Re: Why I Choose Delphi
#190I still compile a old project in Delphi 7 once every 3 months just to add 5 lines of code, and they pay me monthly for it. It's cheaper than porting the whole system to any other language. It is a project that I've built 8 years ago. Delphi was already a "strange think" on that time, it was declining fast. I think Java killed Delphi - "One codebase for all platforms, even your freezer will have Java!" - this was the…
Delphi 7 was last of greatest IDE (on that time) exists. New one add .Net and became larger and unstable. Probably 2007 bring stability. I also start with Pascal (Turbo 3, 4, 5, 5.5 (greatest!), 6 and little bit 7). Then jump to Delphi (all 1-7) and then abandon it.
Yeah, I used Turbo Pascal, starting with TP 1.0 on 8 MHz, 8 bit Z80 with 64kB RAM (entire compiler and TUI in 64kB! compiled even large programs in a few seconds).
Much kudos must go to Anders Hejlsberg, who wrote the compiler in assembly language, starting on it at age 20[1]. Hejlsberg went on to create Delphi, J++, C#, and TypeScript.
I still regard TP 1.0 as one of the best software products I've used, and feel it is a testament to brilliant, performant, compact software development - and to its developer.