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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)

#71

Post by trixie_ »

nightski wrote: post #26
rubber_duck wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating hello world and drawing trivial forms is just as simple with HTML/CSS/JS, you don't need a SPA MVC framework or component libraries or state management framework. Looking back to VB and other WinForms RAD tools it's easy to do that stuff and there are HTML WYSIWYG tools but that double-click code behind logic doesn't scale - software these days is distributed, has more complex requirements and expectations.…

I laugh because you'd think the distributed part would be the toughest one. But nope, it's pretty easy. In fact the client/server model was pretty well understood even in the 90s (or well before that even). In my opinion what has exploded the complexity is the proliferation of environments. The execution environment of our software provides very few guarantees on what is available (no standard library) or even what l…

ExtJS was pretty close, but its license model was never good enough for mass adoption.

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

#72

Post by thijsvandien »

FpUser wrote: post #39
monocasa wrote: post #32

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).

While unsafe memory access can have consequences for stability, it has much broader implications than that. A system can keep running reliably while being heavily exploited.

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

#73

Post by namelosw »

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…

It's strange we eventually reached a place where things go unproductive...

Similar to Smalltalk, and Common Lisp are super fast to develop things. Maybe it is they were relying too much on their superior environment? So that other languages cannot easily replicate so that more generic but not so productive technology stand to the last?

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

#74

Post by temporaryvector »

jcfields wrote: post #66
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 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).

I'm overall surprised at how unpopular/unknown wxWidgets is when the discussion turns to cross platform UI toolkits.

I've used it a lot, as well as other popular toolkits (Qt, GTK, etc.) and I find that wx is, at the very least, the least bad option and overall programming in it hasn't been a pain, regardless of which binding I used.

I guess my only complaint would be that it's a bit harder to do something way outside the norm when compared to Qt, but at that point it might be better to use native SDKs or straight up OpenGL or something for your GUI.

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

#75

Post by betzol »

pjmlp wrote: post #43
fomine3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not 100% on this, but I'm pretty sure that HPC# has a separate, LLVM-based compiler.

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

#76

Post by rubber_duck »

nightski wrote: post #26
rubber_duck wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating hello world and drawing trivial forms is just as simple with HTML/CSS/JS, you don't need a SPA MVC framework or component libraries or state management framework. Looking back to VB and other WinForms RAD tools it's easy to do that stuff and there are HTML WYSIWYG tools but that double-click code behind logic doesn't scale - software these days is distributed, has more complex requirements and expectations.…

I laugh because you'd think the distributed part would be the toughest one. But nope, it's pretty easy. In fact the client/server model was pretty well understood even in the 90s (or well before that even). In my opinion what has exploded the complexity is the proliferation of environments. The execution environment of our software provides very few guarantees on what is available (no standard library) or even what l…

Lol - 90s is the era that gave birth to PHP, I'd wager to say very few things were "well understood".

People writing apps with 100s of global variables was the norm.

If you worked with WPF you'll see angular 2 is very similar in spirit - complexity is on par. I don't really see the difference between native development and JS once you start dealing with the same level of complexity.

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

#77

Post by pjmlp »

betzol wrote: post #75
pjmlp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not 100% on this, but I'm pretty sure that HPC# has a separate, LLVM-based compiler.

Unless something has changed, Burst also uses IL2CPP.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.burst@1.3/manual...

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

#78

Post by kbenson »

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…

There's always a trade-off in technologies between things that are easier to learn, and things that are easier to use once you've learned them. When there's a steady state of people cycling through the system, it's easy to cater to specific segments of the population with different types of tools. Those that don't need hand holding and want the extra bells and whistles to get exactly what they want out of something will likely find their needs met in such a situation.

Now, consider that there's far more new people coming into programming each year than the prior year (or even if it's not strictly true on a year-over-year basis, there are far more software engineers with 1-10 years of experience than there are with 10-20 years experience, possibly even than those with 10+ years experience).

In a market such as that, ease of use is paramount and the killer feature that drives almost all you usage. Catering to amateurs is the path to increased usage, and mind-share, and market-share where applicable. With that in mind, is it really any wonder that amateurs are catered to so much that there's actually a regression in tools that cater to professionals?

My guess is that if you look into subgroups which are not friendly to new users for one reason or another (most commonly because of complexity and skill), yet still have retained users for some reason, you'll find high quality professional tools. I think C/C++ probably fits this, as well as systems programming, and kernel development. I'm not part of any of those subgroups, but my guess is they have not only retained the quality of their supplemental tools, but increased them.

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

#79

Post by guggle »

trixie_ wrote: post #71
nightski wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I laugh because you'd think the distributed part would be the toughest one. But nope, it's pretty easy. In fact the client/server model was pretty well understood even in the 90s (or well before that even). In my opinion what has exploded the complexity is the proliferation of environments. The execution environment of our software provides very few guarantees on what is available (no standard library) or even what l…

ExtJS was pretty close, but its license model was never good enough for mass adoption.

There's a free edition for small business and personal use and a perpetual "enterprise" license for $1,895. Not so bad for a commercial product. But yes, no free software.

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

#80

Post by andi999 »

toohotatopic wrote: post #49
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...

I remember having read the story about Borland as follows: upper management decided software products was a thing of the past and the company had to switch to services. They did that and were out of business in 6 month.
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