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24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

blog.marcocantu.com

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Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#81

Post by agent008t »

Delphi was a great way to get into programming as a kid. You could just drop an image and a timer onto a form, set it to 50ms, edit the onElapse event to move the image according to key-presses, and you've got the start of a simple game! All in a way that is visual and makes intuitive sense to any non-programmer.

And the beauty of the language/IDE was that you could develop serious, complex applications with it, too.

Is there anything similar on the market today? I had a ton of fun with Delphi as a teenager!

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#82

Post by chadcmulligan »

I've been a Delphi developer off and on for 20+ years (since 2, though dabbled with 1). A lot of people focus on the object pascal and it is dated as a language, though the latest is catching up. The IDE has problems now and then with code completion - it pauses a lot and sometimes just stops working, if you come from Visual Studio or XCode this is incomprehensible and annoying.

Where Delphi shines is the VCL - the Visual Component Library and the third party component market. You can integrate components into the IDE by writing them in pascal. Even now there are still lots of components for pretty well anything - even web development.

It also has cross platform components that you can run on iOS/Android/Mac and Windows (edit: theres also a server side linux one) all with the same code, they are compiled to native and if you want you can write native components on all these platforms.

A lot of windows C# components available for sale are actually written in Delphi

You can connect to databases using components, I've written native socket servers by just dragging a couple of components on to a form. For writing business apps there is nothing superior imho

There are components for web development where you can write an SPA all in Pascal and use components

There's a free community edition available now https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter so if you've never looked at Delphi have a look.

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#83

Post by coldtea »

int_19h wrote: post #52
hnzix wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> old GUI paradigms were just right It's a permutation of "worse is better". Skeuomorphism and hierarchical organization cargo-culted as evil, ignoring that our traditional built environments work using these paradigms. User-hostile design. Let's replace all buttons and text labels with arbitrary flat abstract icons! See also: nosql and SPAs.

Extreme skeumorphism a la Mac sometime ago is also undesirable, though. You want them to look just close enough to trigger recognition, everything above that is cognitive overhead.

>Extreme skeumorphism a la Mac sometime ago is also undesirable, though

Mac never had extreme skeumorphism. Extreme skeumorphism would be like the common case of DVD player apps made to look real-life DVD players (with all the frustrating LCD-like text displays and tiny cryptic buttons).

It's not about having 3d looking buttons, or having faux-leather on your Notes app, which are the kinds of things Apple did.

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#84

Post by pjmlp »

mhd wrote: post #74
pjmlp wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their target customers are enterprises, the ones that pay for their tools. Embarcadero prices aren't much different from DB2, Oracle, Visual Studio Ultimate.

Most Delphi software I've seen was more a replacement for Clipper than IBM/Oracle-grade Fortune 500 stuff. One step above Access. Heck, it seems to have kept Firebird alive. And in turn, you get a lot of job offers rewriting Delphi software in C#.

I do know a company doing life sciences robotic control software in Delphi.

Scheduling software and low level control for stuff like BioTek and PerkinElmer devices, for example.

http://www.perkinelmer.com/product/envision-hts-plate-reader...

https://www.biotek.com/peripherals/index.html

In Germany you still get Delphi related conferences.

https://entwickler-konferenz.de/

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#85

Post by amenod »

Svip wrote: post #67

For almost 11 years now, I've been working professionally with Delphi. And it would be wrong to say it's been a smooth ride. There's nothing wrong - per say - with Object Pascal. Or rather, it's not worse than C++, but Delphi - i.e. the library and IDE - is what's lacking behind. It was definitely cutting edge in the mid-90s, but it has not managed to keep with the times. Most Delphi developers rely on Indy, a third…

I think the $1000 price tag is totally wrong. I would never pay that kind of money for an IDE unless it was _really_ better than anything else. But this means:

  - the language has huge community (so I'm not stuck with a dying language)
  - it allows me to do anything (huge extensibility)
Unfortunately it is difficult to change the pricing model once you have existing clients. On one hand they are the only ones paying for your development, so you can't lower the price tag. On the other hand building a bigger community takes time, and it won't happen at this price. So unless they become really creative, Delphi won't survice. Pity, I have used it (yeeeears ago) and it was a brilliant product for building UIs, very easy to use and powerful. Haven't seen anything similar since.

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#86

Post by cmroanirgo »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #82

I've been a Delphi developer off and on for 20+ years (since 2, though dabbled with 1). A lot of people focus on the object pascal and it is dated as a language, though the latest is catching up. The IDE has problems now and then with code completion - it pauses a lot and sometimes just stops working, if you come from Visual Studio or XCode this is incomprehensible and annoying. Where Delphi shines is the VCL - the V…

The last time I was seriously using object Pascal was in the Turbo Pascal days. Even after all this time, it's had a warm place in my heart, despite myriad languages beneath my belt.

It's great that there's community edition for Delphi now. Thanks for the link!

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#87

Post by robocat »

We use Delphi, because we are productive with it, but it is seriously sorry.

Yes, you can develop 64 bit apps with it, but the IDE is still a 32 bit app, which causes problems with large projects.

The Indy components (e.g. http) are unsafe and shitty.

Personally I don't think there is much to recommend.

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#88

Post by Svip »

amenod wrote: post #85
Svip wrote: post #67

For almost 11 years now, I've been working professionally with Delphi. And it would be wrong to say it's been a smooth ride. There's nothing wrong - per say - with Object Pascal. Or rather, it's not worse than C++, but Delphi - i.e. the library and IDE - is what's lacking behind. It was definitely cutting edge in the mid-90s, but it has not managed to keep with the times. Most Delphi developers rely on Indy, a third…

I think the $1000 price tag is totally wrong. I would never pay that kind of money for an IDE unless it was _really_ better than anything else. But this means: - the language has huge community (so I'm not stuck with a dying language) - it allows me to do anything (huge extensibility) Unfortunately it is difficult to change the pricing model once you have existing clients. On one hand they are the only ones paying fo…

The pricing model is the main reason newer people are not getting into Delphi. This is why they tried to lure people with iOS and Android capabilities. But when there are alternatives that are free, why bother?

Yes, Delphi has a Community Edition now (which is free), but the fact that are excluded from a large portion of the library, because you cannot afford it, is always going to alienate some people. And it is always going to feel frustrating, when other languages don't have those limitations.

My office only uses the Professional Edition, because we cannot really afford the Enterprise Edition, which means there were some problems we ended up 'inventing ourselves', because they were only available in the Enterprise Edition.

Delphi probably won't survive another decade (in my estimation), but Pascal will live on as FreePascal/Lazarus.

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#89

Post by andrewwharton »

james_s_tayler wrote: post #79
andrewwharton wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're in the process of migrating off a 4+ million line Delphi application that basically runs the whole business, but it's a 10+ year project to "grind the monolith", so who knows when we'll actually be done. In the meantime, we don't have much choice but to keep paying the licensing costs...

What do you migrate to over a period of 10 years that won't be obsolete 1/3 the way through that effort?? As much as I love making old code new I'm not sure I could stomach a 10 year project.

Microservices, essentially.

It's not really 1 x ten year project as such, but heaps of smaller 3-6 month projects (many running in parallel) to add chunks of new functionality (as microservices) and rewrite parts of the monolith that we can cleanly cleave off.

New parts of UI that are needed don't get added to the Delphi app, but get built as web pages (using React mostly at the moment), which get launched in Chrome windows from the Delphi application.

One day our Delphi app will be an empty shell of it's former self and we can have a huge decommissioning ceremony (party!), but that day's still a long way off... :)

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#90

Post by gattilorenz »

Marco Cantu's (the author of this blog) books on Delphi are/were a great resource for learning the language.

Btw, his website is under heavy load right now (probably the HN hug?), and this is the error I got:

Error in page: /blog/2019-february-24-years-delphi.html

Error Class: EListError

Error Message: List index out of bounds (-1)

Suggesting that the webserver is written in Delphi... that's dedication :)

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