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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)

#91

Post by clouddrover »

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.

It's just another button control available in Delphi's UI library so people use it.

A standard button is a TButton: http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Sydney/en/Vcl.StdCt...

A button with a glyph is a TBitBtn (bit meaning bitmap): http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Sydney/en/Vcl.Butto...

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

#93

Post by pjmlp »

kbenson wrote: post #78
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 w…

If you code in C++ with tooling like QtCreator, Clion, VC++, C++ Builder and everything enabled (static analyses), it can be quite productive and even quite secure.

However it still largely ignored as good practices, in a world where teachers still use IDEs like Turbo C++ as teaching tool.

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

#94

Post by pjmlp »

andi999 wrote: post #80
toohotatopic wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Borland is still in business, although with another name, Embarcadero.

What happened was that decided indies weren't any longer their target demographic and they wanted to be enterprise and focus on product and process lifecycle management (PPLM) tooling instead.

So Delphi and C++ Builder got priced accordingly and they renamed themselves to Inprise.

After 20 years they are trying to get back the indies with community editions, but the damage is already done, and 100% of their customers are enterprise shops.

So unless you are working for a Fortune 500, you will hardly come in touch with Delphi / C++ Builder nowadays.

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

#96

Post by jonnypotty »

danielbarla wrote: post #45
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 scree…

What the hell else to business apps do? I'm genuinely interested to know what you think is the clear issue with showing users data from database tables.

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

#97

Post by jonnypotty »

jjeaff wrote: post #89
me551ah wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention how native client-side apps consume far less memory and CPU than their web/electron counterparts. I miss those days when I would have a bunch of native apps constantly running and minimized. These days it's considered normal for a music player to consume 500MB of memory and for chat apps to consume multiple GBs of RAM.

But if you spent the same amount of money on your dev system adjusted for inflation, of course, then it could probably handle everything you could throw at it.

It's ridiculous that we've relied on hardware to save us and that we do more and more every day. We clap our hands at a bit of text and some pictures on a screen taking hundreds or thousands of megabytes of memory. This incredible ineffecincy means that computers cost more than they should, not as many people have them as could, that we spend more resources than necessary to make them and more electricity to run them than we need to. Why don't programmers generally understand how incredibly wasteful we are with the resources we've been given.

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

#98

Post by jonnypotty »

seangrogg wrote: post #65
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…

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.

Are you really gonna defend the current state of Web development?

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

#99

Post by [deleted] »

jjeaff wrote: post #89
me551ah wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention how native client-side apps consume far less memory and CPU than their web/electron counterparts. I miss those days when I would have a bunch of native apps constantly running and minimized. These days it's considered normal for a music player to consume 500MB of memory and for chat apps to consume multiple GBs of RAM.

But if you spent the same amount of money on your dev system adjusted for inflation, of course, then it could probably handle everything you could throw at it.

[deleted]

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

#100

Post by vram22 »

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).

Nitpick, but wxWidgets is for C++. wxPython is the wrapper for Python.
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