21–30 of 199 posts
At the time we coded on a Sperry Univac 1100 system at varsity and it took bloody ages to compile/debug/run programs.
When I got a loaner PC and a copy of Turbo Pascal it was so amazing and fast.
Excerpt: "I started my coding career using a Turbo Pascal clone for the Commodore Amiga, something called High-Speed Pascal, published by UK based company Hi-Soft." It would be interesting if an open-source version of this Amiga Turbo Pascal clone - was available somewhere...
Here's an overview of Pascal implementations for Amiga: http://fpcamigawiki.alb42.de/index.php?title=Workshop:Amiga,... (however I think when they wrote "development seized", they actually meant "ceased" ;) )
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that is my daily driver nowadays, however .NET AOT experience still misses a bit compared with Delphi. And Delphi is still around, no need to talk as if it was dead. In Germany, it has a regular section on the .NET developers magazine and an yearly conference.
Does anyone do something non legacy in it? Their pricing is a bit of a barrier to entry for new apps now.
That was Borland's mistake with their Inprise change, to abandon grassroots developers and focus on this kind of companies.
This was last year's conference, https://entwickler-konferenz.de/program-en/
Anyone using this hardware, is running Delphi on their network.
I loved Delphi. It was amazing. But then they ate their own future by going to the stratosphere with enterprisey tool acquisitions nobody remembers the names of any more; then they fell back down to earth, and flirted with Kylix -- Delphi for linux -- but at a time of great upheaval in the linux desktop world, and it never really took off either. Meanwhile, the former creator of Delphi had left for MS and created C#…
I still remember interbase, now called firebird. Of course, sqlite is much more prominent today for an embeded database, but for the times without sqlite...
It has all the downsides of service based DB without all the advantages of file based DB.
And the documentation is way below average, backwards compatibility is a joke.
Not to mention the 3rd party software had to design their own(horribly bad) way to handle geometry in firebird... and they keep transactions open forever - and bloody firebird prior to 2.5 had no way to drop the dead connections.
From a technical perspective, it was my favorite attempt to tame a often horrible mess of half-baked database design and ad-hoc solutions -- you can do spaghetti code in every language, but the Delphi apps I saw were usually a bit better than their FoxPro/Access/FileMaker/VB equivalents.
For those missing Delphi, have you considered VS/C#/Winforms? I gonna tell you than its binaries as portable as Delphi/Kylix(e.g. major platforms covered). The language is much less annoying (oh how i hated Type and Var sections in the times). The gui programming style can be similar or can be modernized. The designer and component library is vastly improved. Third party components are cheap compared to today's "clou…
This coming from a python guy who is looking to build a native admin area for a web product.
Delphi was great for developing custom solutions for middle class companies. Not end-user stuff, but no enterprise either. That kind of software vanishing coincides with that whole business sector getting smaller. From a technical perspective, it was my favorite attempt to tame a often horrible mess of half-baked database design and ad-hoc solutions -- you can do spaghetti code in every language, but the Delphi apps…
In a bout of late 90s nostalgia, I convinced my then-employer in 2011 to buy a license for the professional version of Delphi for a software project I was doing, and I was just absolutely shocked about how far it had fallen behind the curve. It seemed that attempting to support a modern tech ecosystem while maintaining some semblance of backwards-compatibility was giving it the worst of both worlds. Add to that enterprise bloat.
I don't know what it's like today, but I sincerely hope that someone will get it back on the right track (or has already done so, as I haven't retried since my experience in 2011).
I find it ironic they describe it as “25 Years of Excellence” because, as much as people go on about the competition, what really broke Delphi was its poor quality control I bloody loved that language, but all of the components had serious errors that resulted in crashes. To make it worse, they are their own dog food, meaning the IDE itself crashed all the time. This wouldn’t have been so bad, but then VB5 happened,…
I loved Delphi. It was amazing. But then they ate their own future by going to the stratosphere with enterprisey tool acquisitions nobody remembers the names of any more; then they fell back down to earth, and flirted with Kylix -- Delphi for linux -- but at a time of great upheaval in the linux desktop world, and it never really took off either. Meanwhile, the former creator of Delphi had left for MS and created C#…
I still remember interbase, now called firebird. Of course, sqlite is much more prominent today for an embeded database, but for the times without sqlite...