My first gig was writing telecoms software using Delphi 3. Good times! Then Inprise bought Borland and shipped a buggy version of Delphi 4 which was a pain. Like many others I jumped ship when I heard what Anders was doing with C#. I don't regret the move but I thought Delphi was great.
22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks
31–40 of 344 posts
Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks
#32Was wondering... is there any modern all-in-one RAD-tool nowadays? And if not... why?
Has there ever stopped being a need for this?
Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks
#33Delphi is still popular in the south of Brazil. It's dying, but slowly. There's a lot a legacy application written in Delphi here. Some old programmers, that only know to program in Delphi, may even build new apps with it. It may not be that modern today, but there's the "pay the bills" mindset. I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today. If it had a resonable price, many people would continue…
> I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today.
I agree with your diagnosis. The problem is that Embarcadero doesn't understand that, and when it does (or when someone else buys Delphi), it may well be much too late to revive it. They could really position various versions of the product in a different way, making the lower tier more affordable.
Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks
#34A shocking aspect of Delphi 1 was the gargantuan executables it insisted on producing. There was much forum posting and gnashing of teeth. Hello World ran to about 100 kB. Funny thing is, I am just getting into Go, and you know what?
> Funny thing is, I am just getting into Go, and you know what?
Hello World is 1MB?
Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks
#35Was wondering... is there any modern all-in-one RAD-tool nowadays? And if not... why? Has there ever stopped being a need for this?
Does Visual Studio count?
Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks
#36I was a Delphi Developer when I started developing software professionally. I loved programming in it. I jumped ship when Anders Hejlsberg, the Chief Architect of Delphi moved to Microsoft to be a lead architect of C#.NET. I used Delphi 6 and 7. When it was time to move to Delphi 8, Borland decided to target .NET. The choice was between learning Delphi 8 for .NET or learn Visual Studio .NET. I chose MS.NET because MS…
Same except after D7 I veered into web development with Coldfusion (I know how to pick a winner!) and then PHP. Ruby & Python much later. I didn't realize how good I had it with Delphi's IDE and interactive debugger.
Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks
#37A shocking aspect of Delphi 1 was the gargantuan executables it insisted on producing. There was much forum posting and gnashing of teeth. Hello World ran to about 100 kB. Funny thing is, I am just getting into Go, and you know what?
There's just no way to develop a GUI application (especially a cross-platform one) without shipping something large.
You can use Electron (and basically bundle Chrome), or JavaFX (and bundle a Java runtime), and they're about the same size. But even if you ship all of the Qt dynamic libs, or all of the GTK dependencies, or even wxWidgets... it's still a far cry from "light".
It just takes tens of megs to make a window appear.
Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks
#38Was wondering... is there any modern all-in-one RAD-tool nowadays? And if not... why? Has there ever stopped being a need for this?
Would Qt count in this? I've made some applications with Qt Creator, aside from not knowing much C++ they were built almost like I would expect in C# , Delphi and VB6. I think C# is the successor to Delphi today, and if Microsoft makes WinForms somehow cross platform and an official part of C# it would get very interesting. The guy in charge of C# at Microsoft made Turbo Pascal and worked on Delphi back in the day as well.
Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks
#39Was wondering... is there any modern all-in-one RAD-tool nowadays? And if not... why? Has there ever stopped being a need for this?
It's called Delphi XE (currently 10.2)