I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#91

Post by bruce511 » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 4:07 AM UTC

loa_in_ wrote: post #66

ctoth wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is way easier than the stuff I was reading before which said I needed some sort of 3rd party paid component for it, nice.

Third party paid component for parsing strings into basic data types and making http requests? That doesn't sound right even for late 20th century

I love comments like this because it shows me how diverse this field is, and how different everyone's experience and expectations are.

As a counterpoint to your comment, I make a living writing high-quality libraries. Everything I make is "in the box", but its not hard to improve on that.

My most popular tools are around string functions, json and xml readers/writers and network functionality.

So, on one hand I'm selling ice-cream in Alaska, on the other hand, it's good ice-cream.

It's a small market, a pimple on a niche, but its big enough to keep me going and that's big enough for me.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#92

Post by NikkiA » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 4:18 AM UTC

malbs wrote: post #77

malkia wrote: post #17

I started with Turbo Pascal 3, Moved to 4, 4.5, 5, 6 then Delphi. Somewhere in there moved to "C" and then "C++". Couple of observations: - Using C (Borland or Microsoft) required two floppy disks - one for the compiler, one for the linker. With most of the Pascal versions you end up just needing one floppy disk, later it didn't matter as we moved to HDD. - First "terrible" experience (by a friend) - he moved from Pa…

And Turbo Pascal was CHEAP, I think in terms of what you got for your $50? I can't remember the original retail price, you couldn't beat it. Hell, if you kept your eye out you could get copies of Delphi, / Delphi 3 for the cost of a "introduction to Delphi" book which almost always came with a standard license of Delphi. Hobbyist Borland was the best Borland. A really amazing company that fully embraced those origina…

Turbo C was actually about the same price, I paid £32 I believe, and then paid £50 for the upgrade to Borland C++ 3.1 (all as a single purchase), vs paying the £200 or so for C++ on it's own. I remember it arriving the day after in a huge 'crate' full of books.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#93

Post by cthalupa » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 4:23 AM UTC

Nitpick, but the title SHOULD be 'I come to bury Delphi, not to praise it'

The whole point of Mark Antony's speech is that he was, in fact, praising Caesar, despite the line stating otherwise. Flipping it around removes the entire impact of the speech.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#94

Post by brnt » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 4:30 AM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #45

pjmlp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The no-circular-dependencies rule was a huge pain though. It allowed the compiler to be very fast (along with it basically not optimizing), but no other language has copied this C++20 Modules, .NET Assemblies, D modules, Ada packages, and plenty of other othes. Also, Turbo Pascal did indeed allow for circular dependencies between units, as long as the related uses statements were written in the implementation secti…

Modules and assemblies are different. Lots of languages ban circular dependencies between modules (most!). Delphi units were single source files though, and that's a much more painful proposition because it forcibly links source file size and program architecture. I saw a lot of big unit files in Delphi code bases.

Arriving at a place with a Delphi codebase developped over the course of 30 years (some files had 80ies copyrights), the tendency tot have enormously long ones was apparent. 10k lines would be short, and 100k nothing unusual. Really hard tot navigatie, the Delphi IDE doesn't really help with that (or much else really).

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#95

Post by msla » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 4:43 AM UTC

JSR_FDED wrote: post #89

msla wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I started with Turbo Pascal 3, Moved to 4, 4.5, 5, 6 then Delphi. Somewhere in there moved to "C" and then "C++". I never understand why people use "C" as opposed to C. Does anyone use "Pascal" as opposed to Pascal?

If you’re going to quote C please note that you should be using single quotes: ‘C’

Depends on whether I want the string constant or the character constant.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#96

Post by sph » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 5:50 AM UTC

HumblyTossed wrote: post #48

Pascal is objectively verbose. But there's something very aesthetically pleasing about the blockiness of it.

As someone that grew up on C, I always found Pascal positively brutalist with its BEGIN and END blocks, instead of using the more nimble braces.

These days I recognise the immense potential it had, and lament the fact that I never had the chance to learn it properly. My path was Borland Turbo C++, VB6, VC++6 then I moved to the Linux world.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#97

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 6:15 AM UTC

malbs wrote: post #71

unsubstantiated wrote: post #62

Perhaps unknown to the HN community is that C# periodically gets Delphi features reintroduced in it in one way or another. More recently, C# 9 and 10 have returned the concept of `records` (preferably immutable objects) along with the `with` keyword for making copies with some of the properties changed from the source to the dest object. It has been an interesting decade watching HN metaphorically (and sometimes lite…

When he adds metaclasses and Virtual Class Functions to C#, I'll say his migration of Delphi features is finally complete.

Only if we get the same flexibility in native code and COM interop, for the complete feature set.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#98

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 6:18 AM UTC

dvh wrote: post #47

$4400 per seat (of which $1000 is annual fee) for a windows-only product with zero job postings?

It is still quite used in many European countries, I know of German and Belgian companies, and there are enough companies to keep an yearly conference going, and regular sessions on BASTA! conference in Germany.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#99

Post by mike_hearn » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 7:50 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #54

mike_hearn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modules and assemblies are different. Lots of languages ban circular dependencies between modules (most!). Delphi units were single source files though, and that's a much more painful proposition because it forcibly links source file size and program architecture. I saw a lot of big unit files in Delphi code bases.

Apparently no one read the part about dependencies being allowed between implementations section, and I imagine also never looked into Delphi packages, in regards to code size and organising units.

I recall being allowed to have dependencies between implementation sections, but this was still quite a painful restriction.

I don't remember Delphi packages, indeed. It was a long time ago now.

Re: I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

#100

Post by ivanhoe » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 8:15 AM UTC

I keep saying this every time Delphi is mentioned, but it definitely deserves the praises:

Borland Delphi had the best and the most useful documentation/help system that I ever used - and those were times before Google or even access to Internet for many of us, so reading manuals played a huge role in learning.