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

jonlennartaasenden.wordpress.com

61–70 of 162 posts

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

#61

This blog is not an article but a rant full of half-truths and outright lies. The author doesn't realize that most C# developers have no knowledge of the history of both Pascal and C (I'm old enough to know) because they were born decades after these languages came into being. The author also misses the point that C and C++ are systems programming languages (for developing operating systems, device drivers and low-le…

Apple used Object Pascal to write their OSes until they bought NeXT.

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

#62
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the distinction you're making about C and C++ being systems languages, and Pascal being an application language totally holds. Pascal is a totally fine system s language. AEGIS (a from scratch Unix like) was written in Pascal and by all accounts was a great option at the time. And what makes C and C++ unsafe exists in Pascal.

Modern C++ is actually pretty safe. Pascal is reasonably safe as well if you know what you're doing. And all this safety talk is over-hyped anyways. Just learn hot to program properly. I do not really remember when was the last time I had problem with "safety" in either Delphi or C++. My commercial apps (C++, Delphi and C for firmware run for years without a single crash report).

Yep really safe, Google and Microsoft security centers can confirm that.

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

#63
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 scree…

Most enterprise apps that I encounter seem to be massively overcomplicated for what they actually do.

I think the big issue is every app I use/develop in the enterprise needs single sign on and fine grained access control. Those modern requirements create a minimum layer of complexity that really slows things down.

But yeah, the whole enterprise programming world really missed an opportunity with JavaFX. For all the shit they get being able to deploy desktop apps in a virtual environment is really powerful.

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

#64
post #27

Except that C# worked on 64-bit OS's practically from the start and Delphi--still only marginally does. And this isn't theoretical--Altium actually did a full code rewrite in order to get off of Delphi because of this.

Unfortunately C# and the rest of .NET ecosystem (and for that matter Java and rest of JVM) are not fully 64bit capable to this day and will probably not be fully 64bit capable for the next decade if ever. What do I mean with this? .NET and JVM native arrays use 32bit indexes and most standard container classes also use 32bit indexes so you cannot have more than 2^31 elements. Who needs that many elements in the array? No-one who develops in these environments...because they can't have them so they move to something that can.

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

#65
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…

Isn't a day on HN unless someone complains about web development while pining for the days when they were building command line calculators in COBOL on their mainframes while sipping espresso with Turing and Dijkstra.

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

#66
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 very badly want to get back to this. Maybe with Python and Qt on Mac?

I did a couple of small projects in Python using wxWidgets recently, and I was surprised at how easy it was (as well as how consistent the results were between Windows and Mac OS).

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

#67
post #27

Except that C# worked on 64-bit OS's practically from the start and Delphi--still only marginally does. And this isn't theoretical--Altium actually did a full code rewrite in order to get off of Delphi because of this.

This hurt one of my competitors, they couldn't support 64 bit machines for a long time because they were using Delphi.

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

#68
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…

The advantage of web apps is in deployment. Developing a stand-alone app in Delphi or Visual Basic was highly productive, but distribution, installation and updating was a headache. And it would only run on one platform.

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

#69
post #68
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…

The advantage of web apps is in deployment. Developing a stand-alone app in Delphi or Visual Basic was highly productive, but distribution, installation and updating was a headache. And it would only run on one platform.

Ease of deployment does not preclude ease of development.

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

#70
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…

Isn't a day on HN unless someone complains about web development while pining for the days when they were building command line calculators in COBOL on their mainframes while sipping espresso with Turing and Dijkstra.

Don't worry, eventually the web development will be figured out and it retrospect we'll look like cavemen rubbing two sticks together.
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