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

21–30 of 194 posts

Re: I miss Delphi

#21

Post by acqq »

hboon wrote: post #11
jarjoura wrote: post #5

Delphi had its place in 2001 along with NeXT's WebObjects. Products of their time for sure. However, the developer inspectors alone inside of Chrome and Safari are 100x more powerful than any of those old UI tools of the past.

100x more powerful than the Visual Builder in VisualAge suite of products [1] and Dolphin Smalltalk's MVP-based tool and code browsers [2]? While those (along with Delphi's VCL) are now a shadow of their past or completely defunct, I doubt anything comes close to them technically, let alone 100x more powerful than them. PS: I just missed that this is about Web development though. Will just leave the comment here for…

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 took significantly longer to run than they did under version 1.1.5 of Sun's JDK. Therefore, I would not recommend VAJava for testing applications which are primarily computational."

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. Maybe VAJava was different?

Re: I miss Delphi

#23

Post by jug »

pjmlp wrote: post #15
pron wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently had to write a desktop GUI app, and chose Electron[1] because I figured that for once I'd try something new and hip with lots of OSS libraries because it wasn't too critical and I needed to pass it on to someone else and figured there are lots of frontend web devs around. Well, it's kinda OK, but man, that thing is held together with spit and baling wire, and you feel like it's all going to come down with…

What I mostly hate in webdev is exactly that, helding together with spit and baling wire, a pile of HTML tags meant for document publishing, CSS and JavaScript, while pretending the browser is a proper application VM. Than switching browsers, including the same one but a different version, and start implementing workarounds. Multiplying this experience for each browser/version/OS required by the customer.

It's at least better than it once was, heck everything is better with modern Javascript etc., transpiling from TypeScript, tooling or whatever. But yeah, the issues with the underpinnings is in my opinion still funny enough exactly as readily apparent as ever.

Re: I miss Delphi

#24

Post by Joeboy »

I guess this is rather tangential, but I recently returned to professional web development and I'm finding a shocking amount of the work is either rewriting websites according to the whims of SEO consultants, or updating things to new releases when the old versions stop getting security updates. Neither of which are really issues for Delphi projects.

Re: I miss Delphi

#25

Post by mtkd »

If anyone using Delphi to build big apps in early 90s was told that to do the same function in 25 years time they would need HTML, CSS, JS, Ruby or PHP or similar, some SQL, some Rust or Go and probably a few DSLs - it would take months longer to build - require multiple servers - and would need more test code than app code to get it 98% as stable - you wouldn't have believed a word of it.

Every single time I have to use a grid control online I shake my head.

I strongly suspect the generation after this will rediscover the power of desktop apps and some of the dev tools that were around at that time. Web interfaces just don't work efficiently for some roles - especially in enterprise environments.

Re: I miss Delphi

#28

Post by kriro »

I only wrote a couple of non-GUI toy programs in Pascal "back in the day" and did some disassembling for fun because someone told me it won't look like C disassemblies (they were right!) but tbh, Delphi from what I remember (only saw it used, never used it) isn't wow-ing me more than current state of the art GUI-builders (like say Storyboards for the Apple ecosystem) so I suppose it's mostly nostalgia? Not sure comparing it to web development is fair but (all those wicket corner cases aside) I actually like the simplicity of web layouting as well. With a decent reset or bootstrap or whatever (and maybe flexbox) I think pure HTML+CSS is very direct and can be prototyped rather quickly via "textfile change and see".

Re: I miss Delphi

#29

Post by supercoder »

mtkd wrote: post #25

If anyone using Delphi to build big apps in early 90s was told that to do the same function in 25 years time they would need HTML, CSS, JS, Ruby or PHP or similar, some SQL, some Rust or Go and probably a few DSLs - it would take months longer to build - require multiple servers - and would need more test code than app code to get it 98% as stable - you wouldn't have believed a word of it. Every single time I have to…

You're still using Rust / Go ? I've been using Luna on the Rocket stack, with Huston for distribution and Apollo for stack management, and it fixes mostly all the problems you've mentioned.

Re: I miss Delphi

#30

Post by Svip »

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 Delphi is a major hindrance. And if you do find something, it's usually not of the same quality as the alternatives for other languages.

I have nothing against Pascal, per say, but I do feel that I am being deliberately terse for the sake of the compiler, rather than for clarity. Indeed, having to declare all variables at the beginning of a method doesn't necessarily make it more clear, sometimes the reverse.

Even a popular tool like Indy for Delphi doesn't correctly implement the HTTP protocol, and therefore doesn't respond as you'd expect on malformed headers, so you have to handle those calls yourselves.

Delphi was leading the pack in the 1990s, but has since fallen behind greatly.

I've written a web server - and maintain a web server - in Delphi, and it's not something I would wish on anyone else.

Post reply on HN