It's good for teaching purposes because it forces a very structured clear line of thinking.
Not convinced it's still best as a practical language though.
22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks
71–80 of 344 posts
Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks
#72Delphi is still unrivaled when it comes to rapid GUI prototyping in combination with easy deployment. It's much easier than QT/GTK and you usually get a standalone .exe with no external dependencies. I really want to cry when I see the current alternatives... Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this?
Windows Forms is still a completely decent option that gives you the same advantages.
Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks
#73A 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?
My first Hello World in Ada was 2.3 MB, but I'm sure it was the most safe and reliable Hello World in existence.
I have no idea what you did, but I find that hard to believe, and this is with GNAT.
I have a hello.adb program, 99bytes, compiled 25k
-rwxrwxr-x 1 seg seg 25352 Nov 2 01:26 hello
-rw-rw-r-- 1 seg seg 99 Nov 2 01:23 hello.adb
-rw-rw-r-- 1 seg seg 1409 Nov 2 01:26 hello.ali
-rw-rw-r-- 1 seg seg 1576 Nov 2 01:26 hello.oRe: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks
#74Delphi is still unrivaled when it comes to rapid GUI prototyping in combination with easy deployment. It's much easier than QT/GTK and you usually get a standalone .exe with no external dependencies. I really want to cry when I see the current alternatives... Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this?
I miss VB6 and VB.net desktop apps as well. still my go to platform for personal apps, so easy to write. Not really sure why for internal company apps people are moving to webapp.
Completely agree. It's hard to beat VB6 for LOB CRUD apps.
Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks
#75Delphi is still unrivaled when it comes to rapid GUI prototyping in combination with easy deployment. It's much easier than QT/GTK and you usually get a standalone .exe with no external dependencies. I really want to cry when I see the current alternatives... Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this?
Web has a good deployment/discover-ability/accessibility story, Node/Electron/Cordova are just there to reuse the work you already did. It's not technically superior but it's economically superior since you usually get maximum reach with web and then minimize cost with the hybrid approach.
Distribution is the number one reason we do webapps at all. I feel this point is sometimes lost on younger generations that have barely seen on-site deployments at all.
Sometimes you don't need the distribution magic that webapps allow, and can dispense with the huge overhead that comes with it. That's where tools like Deliphi/Windows Forms et al can make your life easier. Today it's a corner case, but it's worth keeping in mind that it's still an option.
Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks
#76Delphi is still unrivaled when it comes to rapid GUI prototyping in combination with easy deployment. It's much easier than QT/GTK and you usually get a standalone .exe with no external dependencies. I really want to cry when I see the current alternatives... Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this?
IMO Pascal is a good, clean language and Borland was a top engineering shop that built Delphi as a rapid development tool that supported Windows. At the time there was nothing comparable for Windows development. There was a huge marked for Windows consumer applications and games (Linux was not a household name yet) and very little outside of clumsy Visual Studio to write them. I recall reading at WSJ at the time that Borland CEO was the only person whom Bill Gates feared as a competitor.
That said, it was 20 years ago. Now there are IMO much better cross platform tools for RAD (Python, Tcl/Tk, ...) and Delphi is showing its age (no Linux targets?). Unless I have to live in a Pascal world there are much better tools today. My 2c.
Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks
#77A 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 windo…
It shouldn't ever take that much. This is an example of what a 64kB executable could accomplish in 2016:
Darkness Lay Your Eyes Upon Me - Conspiracy - Revision 2016 64k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SEGm2lUSY0
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67106
After watching a few 64k demoscene demos, a 380MB Electron-based minimalist text editor just seems horribly bloated. (I'm currently writing a cross-platform Windows/Linux/Mac GUI app in Xojo, and the macOS version is 11.6MB at the moment.)
Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks
#78I attended a Clipper user group in Atlanta in the mid 1990's, with my dad. He was into Clipper, was trying to get me interested. The Clipper folks were also into Turbo Pascal. A Borland rep was there to give out swag and talk up the imminent release of Borland Delphi. The Clipper crowd was divided--some excited, some not so much. The older guys, like my dad, had come up programming with punched cards and tape drives.…
You brought me back in time.
Turbo Pascal 6.0/TASM for applications that required performance or system programming like, and Clipper Summer '87 (shortly replaced by the 5.0 OOP version) for database frontends.
Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks
#79A 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? package main func main(){print("Hello");} is 951kB on my computer. But you need to remember that Go bundles a whole runtime with your executable, something C doesn't do.
> something C doesn't do.
Sure it does, not all C compilers are like gcc with the idiosyncratics of glibc.
Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks
#80A 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 windo…
You haven't heard about Red (http://www.red-lang.org), have you? With some Kb you can ship GUI executables for Windows, Android, OSX and Linux. (OSX and Linux soon).
Try it and report back the amount of Kb (not Mb) used.