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I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

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Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#21

Post by avg_dev »

kgeist wrote: post #15
mike_hearn wrote: post #14

The no-circular-dependencies rule was a huge pain though. It allowed the compiler to be very fast (along with it basically not optimizing), but no other language has copied this because combined with weak to non-existent refactoring tools it was just a constant pain to be hitting this limitation whilst developing. Sure, if you're an architecture god who plans out all their internal interfaces in advance on paper it w…

>The no-circular-dependencies rule was a huge pain though. It allowed the compiler to be very fast (along with it basically not optimizing), but no other language has copied this Go forbids circular dependencies.

indeed it does; i've run into it a few times. just last week i was writing some go code in vscode and it wasn't working because i had a circular dependency. vscode was reporting something in the "problems" window like a "go list" failure due to "no go files". i couldn't make head or tail of it for a few minutes. it took me some time to note that the path listed in the issue was one i had just edited. in fact, i didn't even notice the path at first -- i tried running `go list` from my repo root and didn't see the error, but when i saw the path and changed to that dir and tried again, i saw the `go list` error as reported by vscode, and i think that when i opened the file i had just edited in vscode it displayed a more understandable cyclic import message in the offending import, and it was easy to go from there.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#22

Post by msla »

malkia wrote: post #17

I started with Turbo Pascal 3, Moved to 4, 4.5, 5, 6 then Delphi. Somewhere in there moved to "C" and then "C++". Couple of observations: - Using C (Borland or Microsoft) required two floppy disks - one for the compiler, one for the linker. With most of the Pascal versions you end up just needing one floppy disk, later it didn't matter as we moved to HDD. - First "terrible" experience (by a friend) - he moved from Pa…

> I started with Turbo Pascal 3, Moved to 4, 4.5, 5, 6 then Delphi. Somewhere in there moved to "C" and then "C++".

I never understand why people use "C" as opposed to C.

Does anyone use "Pascal" as opposed to Pascal?

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#23

Post by glonq »

malkia wrote: post #17

I started with Turbo Pascal 3, Moved to 4, 4.5, 5, 6 then Delphi. Somewhere in there moved to "C" and then "C++". Couple of observations: - Using C (Borland or Microsoft) required two floppy disks - one for the compiler, one for the linker. With most of the Pascal versions you end up just needing one floppy disk, later it didn't matter as we moved to HDD. - First "terrible" experience (by a friend) - he moved from Pa…

I regret completely missing the boat on Delphi.

I used Turbo Pascal 3 thru 6, but after college migrated towards C/C++ and never had reason to use Delphi professionally or personally.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#24

Post by kylecazar »

msla wrote: post #22
malkia wrote: post #17

I started with Turbo Pascal 3, Moved to 4, 4.5, 5, 6 then Delphi. Somewhere in there moved to "C" and then "C++". Couple of observations: - Using C (Borland or Microsoft) required two floppy disks - one for the compiler, one for the linker. With most of the Pascal versions you end up just needing one floppy disk, later it didn't matter as we moved to HDD. - First "terrible" experience (by a friend) - he moved from Pa…

> I started with Turbo Pascal 3, Moved to 4, 4.5, 5, 6 then Delphi. Somewhere in there moved to "C" and then "C++". I never understand why people use "C" as opposed to C. Does anyone use "Pascal" as opposed to Pascal?

I hadn't seen it before this. Stood out to me.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#25

Post by sema4hacker »

Having started with FORTRAN in 1970, then discovering the beauty of IF-THEN-ELSE in PL/I, then using ALGOL W in college, all made Pascal a natural successor for me out of school (first MacPascal on Macintosh then Delphi on Windows). Still using Delphi 6 for projects to this day.

What was/is particularly nice about Delphi is the library of GUI objects, single .EXE output with no dependencies, and the ease with which arbitrary-length strings can be used.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#26

Post by codr7 »

magicalhippo wrote: post #12
codr7 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's all proprietary, and continuously deprecated to blend better with the latest hype. I did 13 years with Delphi, full time.

We have a fair bit of code in production that was written over 20 years ago. It just works. It has gone through strings switching from 8-bit to Unicode (16-bit) with hardly any modification. We upgrade every year or so, and in almost all cases it's smooth sailing. Delphi has been quite good so far when it comes to long term maintenance.

Not my experience.

First they deprecated the bundled DB bindings, after hyping them to hell and back; then the bundled report generator. We had more than a million lines of code depending heavily on those.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#27

Post by dminvs »

msla wrote: post #22
malkia wrote: post #17

I started with Turbo Pascal 3, Moved to 4, 4.5, 5, 6 then Delphi. Somewhere in there moved to "C" and then "C++". Couple of observations: - Using C (Borland or Microsoft) required two floppy disks - one for the compiler, one for the linker. With most of the Pascal versions you end up just needing one floppy disk, later it didn't matter as we moved to HDD. - First "terrible" experience (by a friend) - he moved from Pa…

> I started with Turbo Pascal 3, Moved to 4, 4.5, 5, 6 then Delphi. Somewhere in there moved to "C" and then "C++". I never understand why people use "C" as opposed to C. Does anyone use "Pascal" as opposed to Pascal?

If it was Borland's compiler suite it may or may not have been perfectly standards-compliant, hence the quotation marks. The Borland suite from the early 90s seemed to be pretty relaxed/forgiving about what was valid C/C++.

My school utilized Turbo C++ 3.0 for instruction (and later 4.5), which implemented some weird subset that was pre-C++98. Plenty of things that I was doing when targeting the Borland compiler barfed terribly when compiled with GCC (or G++).

I'd definitely consider what we were writing in those days "C" or "C++" but not anything that resembles modern software...

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#28

Post by tjalfi »

mike_hearn wrote: post #14

The no-circular-dependencies rule was a huge pain though. It allowed the compiler to be very fast (along with it basically not optimizing), but no other language has copied this because combined with weak to non-existent refactoring tools it was just a constant pain to be hitting this limitation whilst developing. Sure, if you're an architecture god who plans out all their internal interfaces in advance on paper it w…

F# requires code to be in dependency order. You can't refer to types unless the compiler has seen them.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#29

Post by duped »

kgeist wrote: post #15
mike_hearn wrote: post #14

The no-circular-dependencies rule was a huge pain though. It allowed the compiler to be very fast (along with it basically not optimizing), but no other language has copied this because combined with weak to non-existent refactoring tools it was just a constant pain to be hitting this limitation whilst developing. Sure, if you're an architecture god who plans out all their internal interfaces in advance on paper it w…

>The no-circular-dependencies rule was a huge pain though. It allowed the compiler to be very fast (along with it basically not optimizing), but no other language has copied this Go forbids circular dependencies.

Life is better without circular dependencies

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#30

Post by electroly »

msla wrote: post #22
malkia wrote: post #17

I started with Turbo Pascal 3, Moved to 4, 4.5, 5, 6 then Delphi. Somewhere in there moved to "C" and then "C++". Couple of observations: - Using C (Borland or Microsoft) required two floppy disks - one for the compiler, one for the linker. With most of the Pascal versions you end up just needing one floppy disk, later it didn't matter as we moved to HDD. - First "terrible" experience (by a friend) - he moved from Pa…

> I started with Turbo Pascal 3, Moved to 4, 4.5, 5, 6 then Delphi. Somewhere in there moved to "C" and then "C++". I never understand why people use "C" as opposed to C. Does anyone use "Pascal" as opposed to Pascal?

I assume they are doing that to distinguish the Borland products (Borland C and Borland C++) from the programming languages. Everything in that sentence is the name of a Borland product.
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