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Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

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Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#221

Post by Quarrelsome »

vladsanchez wrote: post #161
arghwhat wrote: post #14

This reminds me of a few ( I then found out that they were being taught to use Borland Turbo C . I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its a…

What's the problem with it? Programming snob? Isn't it still C programming after all? I don't understand the problem with people bashing Borland after all these years! Didn't you know that the accomplished Mr Anders Hejlsberg was behind Borland (TurboPascal and Delphi), before he was appointed to develop Microsoft C# and Typescript? So, what's the/your problem!?

I'm thinking of a graduate turning up for a modern programming position and opining:

> I know Delphi!

I would argue you can made good courses in any language and it would seem more convenient to teach in something that has better transferrability into industry.

Also the response is likely aggravated by this quote from the source article:

> a curriculum that has taken heavy damage from the adoption of Java and C# in the early 2K’s.

wut?

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#222

Post by marcocantu »

billfruit wrote: post #186
vladsanchez wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the problem with it? Programming snob? Isn't it still C programming after all? I don't understand the problem with people bashing Borland after all these years! Didn't you know that the accomplished Mr Anders Hejlsberg was behind Borland (TurboPascal and Delphi), before he was appointed to develop Microsoft C# and Typescript? So, what's the/your problem!?

May be one problem might be that it might condition learners to the peculiarities of programming for DOS and its archaic memory model, which aren't that of relevance to modern systems.

What are you talking about? Delphi let's you build Android apps, not just DOS apps. And iOS, and Win64, etc...

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#223

Post by blablabla123 »

devpts11 wrote: post #61
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Borland C and Pascal were great for learning programming in mid-90s, because of one crucial feature: an immensely good built in help reference. Whenever you wanted to know syntax of some command, you print this command, press ctrl-f1 and is presented with docs, complete with a working example . It was insanely great. Remember, stack overflow didn't exist then.

Stack Overflow has dumbed people down significantly because of the mental laziness it engenders. In a time before the internet, it used to be that books, and occasionally magazines, were the initial entry points to understanding software, hardware and electronics. Then the BBS came along, these secret islands of knowledge and trade. I learned Pascal and assembly on Turbo Pascal with trial-and-error and lots of contex…

But StackOverflow helps only with basic to common intermediate problems. The most upvoted answers often resemble the most common beginner problems. So it indeed very much replaces the old paper/online help documentation, is often better written and more readily available. On the other hand for more difficult problems it's common to not get an answer. In fact the problem might be so specific that it's even against the SO rules.

> coding will decline or bifurcate more because general AI will allow non-programmers to ask a machine

I was expecting this development with the rise of React since at least the visualization part has become completely declarative. It's no rocket science to automatically transform that, in fact being an XML dialect there are a lot of tools available for this. But still, even in 2020 people still make money with writing HTML/CSS either plain or within a CMS.

In fact even a reverse development happened in some regard. In the 90s it was quite common for people to write CRUD apps running in Access, FoxPro etc. These tools - like Delphi which might be closest to that - practically disappeared.

The analytical load is still there and cannot be abstracted away. The decline of Access etc. happened because many aspects couldn't be mapped. Not to speak of all the nitty gritty details needed to make applications run safely and maintainable. There's still a very long road ahead to automatize all that, especially in a way that it consumes only a reasonable amount of CPU, memory and storage...

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#224

Post by theamk »

mamcx wrote: post #217
arghwhat wrote: post #14

This reminds me of a few ( I then found out that they were being taught to use Borland Turbo C . I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its a…

The mistake is assuming Delphi is bad and stupid. Delphi is MUCH better than C and C++. Miles ahead. Pascal is what we need, but C is what we deserve. Billons of dollars wasted in it. What it have bad is the massive mismanagement of the owners, and that translate to lack the influx of talent to it. Note: I'm moderator in a Delphi forum and use it for years. I'm now in rust, and is great yet: - Some of the problems th…

I fondly remember using Delphi to create native Windows GUIs. It was really great for this.

The reason I stopped using it was that I discovered that there are many more program types than Windows GUIs - and there, C++ (or sometimes C) is really the best. High performance lock-free lists? Support for obscure network protocols? Containers with custom allocators? Delphi does not really work there.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#225

Post by vorpalhex »

loxs wrote: post #182
vorpalhex wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is what many of us consider to be basics - big O notation, b-trees, so on are not really needed by the average programmer. They might be useful (I get use from them) but they're not necessary. Likewise, getting into intimate discussions on file encoding or strings in memory just isn't going to be retained by someone whose major interaction with a computer is facebook. Focus on practical tasks, but take time…

I'm not even talking about big O or algorithms & data structures. I'm talking about the basic concepts of function, iteration, abstraction, indirection etc.

Yeah those are definitely things that new programmers need to learn, but they usually need to learn them by doing things the hard way a few times first.

"yeah, that's a lot of copy and pasting isn't it? Want a neat trick to save yourself some effort?"

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#226

Post by my123 »

non-entity wrote: post #70
revanx_ wrote: post #30

I programmed in Delphi for 8 years, then I switched to FreePascal. Yes, the grass is greener on the other side, and it's also free.

Going to start a project in in FreePascal soon because it seems to be the only [not abandonware] compiler for a high level language that still supports targeting 8086.

GCC is a good choice too for those still.

Also, you can get a version with support even from Mentor at https://www.mentor.com/embedded-software/sourcery-tools/sour...

Look at the: > These releases provide cutting edge support for 8088, 8086, 80186 and 80286 processors from the year 1984.

section.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#227

Post by peter_d_sherman »

neves wrote: post #162
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Borland C and Pascal were great for learning programming in mid-90s, because of one crucial feature: an immensely good built in help reference. Whenever you wanted to know syntax of some command, you print this command, press ctrl-f1 and is presented with docs, complete with a working example . It was insanely great. Remember, stack overflow didn't exist then.

They also were quick compilers and fit in a floppy.

If the old harware aphorism is "Never trust a computer larger than you can lift", then the software counterpart to that must be "Never trust a compiler that doesn't fit on a single floppy".

"Never trust a compiler that doesn't fit on a single floppy"

I'm coining that second expression right here on Hacker News, today, 1/22/2020!

I'm fairly certain no one has said it prior...

But if they have, then my humble apologies, and in such case I'm un-coining it...

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#228

Post by badsectoracula »

0-_-0 wrote: post #41
taneq wrote: post #19

I was curious a little while ago whether Delphi or something similar was still available for modern computers (I think it followed from the same question about MS Access and VB6). Turns out there's a free Delphi-compatible IDE called Lazarus: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Has anyone here used Lazarus? It looks great from its description but I'd be interested in an independent opinion.

Yeah i use it for many years. The language is good, not free of warts, but does the job perfectly fine. The IDE might be a bit confusing at a first glance, but it is easy to figure out and it is so responsive it puts every other IDE to shame (consider that it runs and is usable on an original Raspberry Pi - which AFAIK has the equivalent power of a 300MHz PC). But the crown is the LCL/FCL (the VCL equivalent) framework with its tight integration with the IDE and visual designer (which you can use not just for GUI forms, but for creating actions, non-visual objects, collections, etc though obviously most of the focus has been on the GUI designer).

Here is a simple tool i wrote in a couple of days in Lazarus:

http://runtimeterror.com/tools/bugs/

Also here are a couple of other applications i've written with it:

http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/

http://runtimeterror.com/tools/lila/

I've written some other stuff too, like this graph editor:

https://i.imgur.com/S2qTuU1.png

or this 3D world editor:

https://i.imgur.com/s0GaK0A.png

https://i.imgur.com/316SmAh.png

or these two tools for creating bump maps and combining meshes to create textures:

https://i.imgur.com/RaZQz68.png

...but those are run-of-the-mill tools that i haven't available anywhere. Also i have a bunch of other tools i do not have screenshots of and there might be some other stuff on the server i do not remember :-P.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#229

Post by briandear »

zozbot234 wrote: post #107
levosmetalo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that somehow wrong? What was so fundamentally changed in CS that makes teaching C obsolete?

We have Rust now which is a type-safe and memory-safe language. C is totally obsolete.

We also have Swift. We also have

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#230

Post by briandear »

tristador wrote: post #92
arghwhat wrote: post #14

This reminds me of a few ( I then found out that they were being taught to use Borland Turbo C . I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its a…

I've been toying with the idea of running a few classes to help early and mid-career adults learn to program. Although it's been so long since I first learned that I worry I'd struggle to get the basics across. Does anyone have a recommendation for a good, up to date, open source, introduction to programming? Ideally something that uses an experienced programmer (i.e. me) to guide.

Ruby the Hard Way.
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