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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

#321

Post by kragen »

briandear wrote: post #253
kragen wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want to build a restaurant accounting/billing app as a desktop app instead of a browser app?

Because you can do more with a desktop app than a browser app. Not everything is or should be in the goddamned cloud.

Sure you can, Brian, but those things aren't relevant to a simple line of business app like that. And I agree that it shouldn't be in the cloud; it should be on a Raspberry Pi in the back room of the restaurant, next to the Wi-Fi. Or, well, a Chinese clone, since you wouldn't want an Iranian restaurant to be dependent on imports from England.

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

#322

Post by badsectoracula »

MrGilbert wrote: post #297
badsectoracula wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the Delphi version. Delphi 2 (what i used and still use sometimes) creates a VCL app at around 200KB. Later versions added a bit, but i think it wasn't until after Delphi 7 that sizes ballooned. However i have a feeling that MrGilbert refers to using the Windows API directly without VCL in which case you can create very small executables.

Yes, exactly - sorry I didn't clarify. There were folks out there who created stripped down versions of Systems32 classes, so you had a basic skeleton running. Maybe I should write a progam like that, just for the fun of it. It still works nowadays. I might even get away with FreePascal. I'll give it a try. :)

Yeah it should work. A few years ago i reimplemented in Free Pascal most of the OWL 1.0 API that shipped with Turbo Pascal for Windows and you can create some very small executables with it:

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

(that 82KB executable uses almost all of the API's functionality, including type registration, dynamic instantiation and object streaming)

Though i never did anything with it, i mainly wrote it for fun. The OWL 1.0 API isn't really that better than using raw Win32 :-P. But perhaps now that Free Pascal added support for Win16 in the trunk i could port it there.

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

#323

Post by kragen »

Accacin wrote: post #126
kragen wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Professional programmers scoff at "old" languages like this Old languages? Delphi is a lot newer than C. C in a mostly modern form dates from about 1977; Delphi is from 1995. If you want to just write code in a box and have it run, maybe you should use http://sketchpad.cc/ or https://jsfiddle.net/ . Or code.labstack.com, intervue.io, codepad, codiva.io, paiza.io, compilr, ideone, onlinegdb, repl.it, rextester, myco…

I love the fact that you completely ignore that a large percentage of people do not have internet access, and even if they do it can be very slow. Just because Delphi isn't cool doesn't mean it's not useful. It can teach many concepts that students can build on if they desire to. Heck, you're acting like the first language you learn is even important. I learnt using Visual Basic 6 and it's not like I didn't go and le…

Way more people have internet access than have desktop computers to run Delphi on. Like, by about a factor of 5.

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

#324

Post by ChainOfFools »

arghwhat wrote: post #269
adwn wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rust [...] everything is web-based Correction: Rust's help and documentation is HTML -based, and getting a local, automatically updated copy is trivial. > even "local" docs launch in a web browser Uh, so what? Can you name a better format for programming language documentation that's also ubiquitously supported?

With Go, the ability to instantly read docs for anything (even just pulling docs for a single function) in terminal is extremely helpful and far superior to a HTML-only approach. "go doc net/http.Client" pulls up the docs for the http client type. It's one of the features I miss most as I code Rust, and the lack is very detrimental to the coding experience, as pulling up a browser is a massive context switch.

it's a mere scripting language, but I love the similar way powershell does this also, get-help [some-command] -examples

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

#325

Post by dang »

turkthrower123 wrote: post #210

I wonder how much Delphi/Idera bribed the head of the Ministry of Industry and Technology for this boondoggle. Allahallah, and they wonder why 10% of our country is illiterate. Every single decision by the government is made from the perspective of "how can I make a lira off of this" MIIT chief Faruk Özlü just bought himself a new mansion in Mugla over the summer. Just saying.

We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. Political flamewar is off topic here, regardless of how right and/or righteous your cause is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#326

Post by Phylter »

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…

Or someone marketed the software to Turkey as a great way to increase their IT skill set as a country. Borland was awesome back in the day (at least in my opinion) but what Embarcadero has done with the software in years recent is a travesty. If they're going to insist on Pascal they should go with Lazarus.

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

#327

Post by [deleted] »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #315
adwn wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Info format. I said "ubiquitously supported". There are several orders of magnitude difference between info format support and HTML support. > Emacs is the most ubiquitous of IDE's That's laughably wrong.

Well, it may be on everyone's machine (just type 'which emacs') but that hardly makes it the most commonly used IDE, which I think is what's hard to stomach.

[deleted]

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

#328

Post by ak39 »

jetti wrote: post #295
mamcx wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem I had with Delphi was Embarcardero's pricing. At the time I was looking into it there was no express license or anything similar so it would've been a few hundred dollars to just try and learn. Contrast that with Visual Studio Express which was free and allowed me to learn C#. There was a significant cost to learning Delphi. Since then, however, I discovered Free Pascal and its ability to support multiple…

The pricing is indeed ridiculous. I wonder if they might in fact see a bigger uptake if they reduced their Professional version dramatically.

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

#329

Post by ak39 »

thu2111 wrote: post #245
badsectoracula wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has a lot of anachronisms Such as?

It's not garbage collected, but also, not completely manually memory managed either. I can't quite recall how it works but it's mostly some sort of ref counting + some manual. When teaching, non-GCd languages just get in the way. You don't want students apps to be segfaulting constantly because they're running into memory errors whilst you're trying to teach them something else. Learn programming and get confident wi…

>>My programs crashed with the dreaded access violation >>error all the time. Debugging that sucked. I assume >>it's better these days.

How would automatic garbage collection help in a scenario where you are deliberately accessing an object that you haven't created or have destroyed already?

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

#330

Post by cies »

mamcx wrote: post #240
theamk wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is an effect of ecosystem, not language. Is interesting to note that you can see "High performance lock-free lists" in many langs, but near none have good GUIs builders. Good GUIs builders are harder, and your "High performance lock-free lists" is easy, also you can use C/C++ libraries in Delphi too...

And with Delphi the language and ecosystem are almost synonymous. Sadly. Is the compiler was free from the start and the IDE would cost money, they might have had a much stronger offering.
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