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Why C# coders should shut up about Delphi (2016)

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Re: Why C# coders should shut up about Delphi (2016)

#41

Post by Boulth »

johnny_reilly wrote: post #19

I love this post. My first gig was slinging Delphi for a telecoms company, my second was C# and I've been involved with TypeScript since it was announced. I'm a complete fan of Anders Hejlsberg work. To the extent that I gave genuine consideration to naming one of my son's "Anders". My wife was not onboard.

As someone that also used languages designed by Anders I'm also a huge fan of his work.

Too bad there are just a few quality interviews with him: https://www.artima.com/intv/anders.html

Re: Why C# coders should shut up about Delphi (2016)

#42

Post by extrapickles »

Jaruzel wrote: post #15
cttet wrote: post #4

This was published in 2016. And the title included "C# coders". I am not a C# coder, but all C# GUI coders I know had praised Delphi for its design and convenience for GUI... edit:grammar

The one thing that bugged me about Delphi apps on Windows, was that they used their own custom buttons on the forms (with little graphics of crosses and ticks etc.). I am not a Delphi programmer, but I always wondered why this was.

Delphi made it easy as a developer to add those icons, and they had a nice standard set named for most actions you would want a user to do in a line-of-business application UI.

Also the hello world apps for Delphi had these icons everywhere so it was "just the way" you built applications using it.

Re: Why C# coders should shut up about Delphi (2016)

#43

Post by pjmlp »

fomine3 wrote: post #37
pjmlp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately .NET Native seems to be on the way out with the project Project Reunion, and it is not clear how AOT support will be like post NET 5 release. So far they are demoing single file release, which is basically packing everything into the same exe, but you get a JIT + MSIL instead.

IL2CPP won't come to .NET Core world?

IL2CPP is Unity product and designed to work together with their new B̶l̶a̶z̶o̶r̶ Burst compiler toolchain.

It is quite different than a general purpose AOT compiler for .NET, as it also takes into account HPC# code patterns.

Re: Why C# coders should shut up about Delphi (2016)

#44

Post by cosmodisk »

johnny_reilly wrote: post #19

I love this post. My first gig was slinging Delphi for a telecoms company, my second was C# and I've been involved with TypeScript since it was announced. I'm a complete fan of Anders Hejlsberg work. To the extent that I gave genuine consideration to naming one of my son's "Anders". My wife was not onboard.

Could you have gotten away with naming him 'Sharp' instead?

Re: Why C# coders should shut up about Delphi (2016)

#45

Post by danielbarla »

trixie_ wrote: post #9

It's hard being an old programmer as some technologies that you used in the past, that were more productive than certain technologies today, are no longer popular. Creating client side apps in the 90s was arguably easier than creating web apps today with the soup of html/css/js frameworks that are changing every month. edit/mass reply: I've been coding web apps with the rest of you guys for 20 years. The web isn't th…

Delphi certainly was supremely productive for the kinds of one-off, bespoke enterprise apps that I was involved with, and it is valid to question why that was the case. I don't think the tooling was necessarily all that superior, the industry trend was simply way towards "slap a grid on top of that SELECT * FROM Orders".

Clearly, there are many things wrong with that, but the fact that one could whip up several screens and essentially ship them in a few hours makes it a worthwhile thought exercise to think about what has been gained, and what lost. Most enterprise apps that I encounter seem to be massively overcomplicated for what they actually do.

Re: Why C# coders should shut up about Delphi (2016)

#46

Post by tim-- »

AlexanderDhoore wrote: post #30
beamatronic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very badly want to get back to this. Maybe with Python and Qt on Mac?

I don't trust Qt licensing anymore. Whatever company owns Qt will forever try to squeeze it for money. They recently changed their licensing AGAIN: https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020

They have not changed any licensing. They have changed the way they are releasing their product. The only thing really that is different here is the fact that they are pushing less code as open source for their stable LTS releases.

If you rely on having a stable Qt, why not pay the company that develops the software? You and I, the developers that use Qt without paying for it, still get the latest and greatest Qt, with all it's source code for free, under the same LGPL license that Qt has always been under.

Re: Why C# coders should shut up about Delphi (2016)

#47

Post by jayd16 »

trixie_ wrote: post #9

It's hard being an old programmer as some technologies that you used in the past, that were more productive than certain technologies today, are no longer popular. Creating client side apps in the 90s was arguably easier than creating web apps today with the soup of html/css/js frameworks that are changing every month. edit/mass reply: I've been coding web apps with the rest of you guys for 20 years. The web isn't th…

I can't help but feel cynical that a fair bit of modern complexity comes from the sheer amount of features that didn't exist. The variety of screens, interfaces, OSes and the accessibility aren't free. Those are why we use all these cumbersome frameworks after all.

Re: Why C# coders should shut up about Delphi (2016)

#48

Post by ryuukk_ »

pjmlp wrote: post #20

Satire or not, one thing I do fully agree. It was a big mistake not embracing AOT from day one, C++ wouldn't have kept its king position in MS ecosystem if the original .NET had been like .NET Native since the begging and kept Delphi like features for low level coding (some of each are have been added since C# 7.x). JIT support could still be an additional option as well, just like on languages like Eiffel. Instead w…

you are finally waking up

too late to complain thought, they killed CoreRT already, and themselves on the same occasion

Microsoft is a dead company anyways

Re: Why C# coders should shut up about Delphi (2016)

#49

Post by toohotatopic »

Animats wrote: post #23

Delphi is one of those languages which was a good product from a failing company - Borland. Just as Modula 3 was a good product from a failing company - DEC.

Have they been failing by themselves or have they been destroyed by Microsoft, e.g. [1]?

[1] http://techrights.org/2009/09/14/ms-admits-draining-to-destr...

Re: Why C# coders should shut up about Delphi (2016)

#50

Post by pjmlp »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #24
pjmlp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately .NET Native seems to be on the way out with the project Project Reunion, and it is not clear how AOT support will be like post NET 5 release. So far they are demoing single file release, which is basically packing everything into the same exe, but you get a JIT + MSIL instead.

I agree. .NET Native was always for the full framework only; I think CoreRT was supposed to be the future there but it seems to be put by the wayside now as with .NET Core 3 the official recommendation for AOT was Mono with no mention of CoreRT in the roadmap. I would love to hear from Miguel what the plans are there. Ironically this comes at the same time that C# the language has become much more usable without GC o…

The low level stuff seems to have come from three fronts, high performance Web servers (trying to be on top results at TechEmpower), improving overall performance for Unity/MonoGame/Xenko, and given their position regarding safer languages, reducing the need to jump into C++/CLI for performance.

Project Reunion seems to be the start of long roadmap to bring UWP tech into Win32, as if Windows 8 had introduced UWP as Win32 evolution without the additional application model.

So if developers don't migrate en masse into UWP, bring UWP APIs (COM v2) to all Windows developers and in 10 years from now pretend that Windows 8.x (UAP)/W10 UWP never happened.

I used to believe in UWP despite all its issues, still think C++/CX was the closest that Microsoft ever came to having their own C++ Builder (C++/WinRT tooling is still too clunky), and .NET Native was what .NET should have been since day one.

Oh, well lets see how all of this will turn out.

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