22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2017-january-22years-delphi.html

by vs2 • 9 years ago

301 337 9 years ago

blog.marcocantu.com

raister• 9 years ago

It rocks to the point of server unavailability.

candiodari• 9 years ago

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

macmac• 9 years ago

Cache also appears dead.

marcocantu4• 9 years ago

Sorry about that, my blog is self-hosted and never gets much traffic -- roughly 100x general volume

bartread7• 9 years ago

Might be worth considering fronting it with something like Cloudflare. I pay them about £20/month and reckon I could handle 10k hits a day on a t2.micro instance in AWS (in reality I'm actually only getting about 10 - 20 visitors a day myself on the site in question, which I'm quite happy with at the moment due to reasons).

kweinber• 9 years ago

After the death of Python, Oracle and Delphi go really well together... give it a shot if you want to see the future.

Edit: this is a historical reference... search for "Oracle Delphi Python"

pryelluw2• 9 years ago

Missing /s tag? Im not sure if the comment is serious.

gilgoomesh• 9 years ago

I think the comment is referring to Pythia, aka "the Oracle of Delphi", who could supposedly see the future:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia

fredsted• 9 years ago

Sometimes I kind of miss Delphi 7. The way it makes it easy to create apps made programming so fun.

Such a shame it went downhill after the .NET stuff.

pboschmann2• 9 years ago

Oh yes, I absolutely loved the tinkering with Delphi and Kylix before I was a professional programmer. I remember Borland distributed Delphi6 for free for personal use and I had a lot of fun with it.

In the end I landed a job as a web developer, worked in PSPad and left Delphi forgotten until the day — a decade or so later after I used Delphi the last time — I opened Eclipse the first time in my life. Never hated a tool, my profession and the IT industry more than at that moment… Why take the compilation so much time? Why are the fonts so ugly? Why does this tool needs more time at startup than the good old Delphi 6 on my 800 Mhz PC ten years ago? And why nobody seems to care about it?

nunobrito2• 9 years ago

Yep. I don't use Eclipse for these same reasons. It really seems someone hates IDE and we arrived on hell for paying back something we did in a past life.

I switched to Netbeans. Slightly better: bigger icons, better looking UI. I like the key combinations there. Still nowhere good compared to Delphi IDE with useful code snippets built-in and easy-to-use creation of UI apps.

mrded• 9 years ago

Delphi 6 was my first one :)

binaryapparatus• 9 years ago

I am bit older than average so I used Delphi in its golden days. Even today few of the old customers need old apps maintained so I keep Delphi 7 ready.

It _is_ great IDE/language.

noir_lord3• 9 years ago

When it comes to quickly developing native line of business applications (the niche between excel spreadsheets and commercial off the shelf) I've still not seen anything that can beat Delphi, the .Net stuff has gotten very good.

endorphone• 9 years ago

Delphi is quite good, but I really truly think it killed a lot of careers: Many of the people that I worked with on a Delphi project late 90s/early 2000s just never let it go, and their job prospects collapsed to the last few residual shops still using Delphi. I suppose this happens with all technologies (e.g. some people clutch on and make Cobol their lifetime effort, etc), but every time I see a Delphi advocacy piece it makes me a little sad remembering the countless emails looking for possible Delphi engagements.

melling• 9 years ago

"Fastest compiler -- 85,000 lines per minute"

What do you get 22 years later on an Intel i7?

antaviana• 9 years ago

On an AWS t2.medium instance, I get 2.5 seconds to compile and link 113,000 lines of code.

Havoc4• 9 years ago

No idea but it was always stupidly fast.

First time I used a C++ compiler I thought it had frozen because the hello world took so long to compile. The notion that something could compile for longer than a split second (for trivial things) didn't occur to me.

vintagedave6• 9 years ago

You get a million lines of code in five seconds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq2mNUzcpE0

marcocantu4• 9 years ago

A million lines in 5 seconds, even if this is generated code: https://community.embarcadero.com/blogs/entry/compiling-a-mi...

fithisux3• 9 years ago

Delphi rocks, but nowadays Dlang has a place in my heart. Pascal seems to verbose.

madiathomas• 9 years ago

I was a Delphi Developer when I started developing software professionally. I loved programming in it. I jumped ship when Anders Hejlsberg, the Chief Architect of Delphi moved to Microsoft to be a lead architect of C#.NET. I used Delphi 6 and 7. When it was time to move to Delphi 8, Borland decided to target .NET.

The choice was between learning Delphi 8 for .NET or learn Visual Studio .NET. I chose MS.NET because MS is the custodian of the .NET Framework. They are the ones on the driving seat, not Borland.

Looking back, I don't regret the move because Delphi is dying. Posts requiring Delphi are nowhere to be seen on job sites in South Africa.

eli2• 9 years ago

Same except after D7 I veered into web development with Coldfusion (I know how to pick a winner!) and then PHP. Ruby & Python much later. I didn't realize how good I had it with Delphi's IDE and interactive debugger.

avodonosov• 9 years ago

ah, Delphi...

aylons2• 9 years ago

One of the first environments I ever programmed was Delphi. Had lots of fun with it, and it had a special place in my heart...

Fast forward 20 years, and I'm a hardware developer using Altium a lot. As some here may be aware, Altium is a multi-gigabit piece of CAD/EDA behemoth written - and still maintained - in Delphi. 3D, DirectX, everything in Delphi.

Just yesterday and today I had easily reproducible BSODs by using a very basic feature (routing nets). Memory leaks galore - most people I know have the habit of shutting Altium down now and then just to avoid a crash. Success is low - it crashes a lot, I'm getting tired of unhandled exceptions windows.

And this way, I realize even great development tools age badly. Of course this is not all Delphi's fault, but it shows how tech is a Red Queen's race: you must run faster and faster to keep in the same place.

noir_lord3• 9 years ago

I don't think that really says anything about Delphi and everything about the massive complexity of large software.

I get regular crashes with a bunch of stuff (everything from Thunar (don't think that shows C has aged badly), Chrome (C++) and Intellij (Java).

tonyedgecombe4• 9 years ago

Some languages make it harder than others, there is a whole class of bugs that just disappear when you have garbage collection for instance.

digler999• 9 years ago

The thunar-crashing thing was introduced. A few years back it was stable, then sometime around a year or 2 ago it broke. Sad to see a good piece of software take a step back (proper testing should have prohibited that, shouldn't it ?).

aylons2• 9 years ago

I half agree with you. It surely shows the massive complexity of large software, for sure.

On the other hand, the tool should help prevent these issues. Altium has visible exceptions and lots of memory leaks that are much easier to prevent or solve with modern development tools and languages.

Also, C aged badly, but the tools (ecosystem seems to be the hip name nowadays) for C evolved, and in a smaller scale, even the language itself has evolved. Object Pascal and Delphi doesn't seem to be catch up so well.

kol4• 9 years ago

We used EurekaLog (https://www.eurekalog.com/) to get nice exceptions and stack traces, even for access violations :) Imagine that: you have a native app, but you also have stack traces like in C# and Java.

I loved to use Delphi in the early- and mid-2000s, but unfortunately Delphi jobs disappeared, and I had to switch to C# and Java development.

edwinyzh• 9 years ago

madExcept is better for this purpose

acqq• 9 years ago

I'll start blogging on the Delphi language coming back to Linux tomorrow!

To taste the cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development today:

http://www.lazarus-ide.org/

http://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?page=whyuse

"Why use Lazarus?

No dependencies!

With Lazarus you can create programs which do not require any platform dependencies [1]. The result of it is the user of your program does not need to install any further packages, libraries or frameworks to run your software.

[1] Linux/BSD applications may depend on GTK2 or alternatively QT. Some add-on packages may also add dependencies of their own

Can be used in commercial projects

Some IDEs restrict their license to only non-commercial development. Lazarus is GPL/LGPL [2][3] which permits using it in building commercial projects.

[2] LGPL with additional permission to link libraries into your binaries. [3] Some additional packages come with various licenses such as GPL, MPL, ... "

dvfjsdhgfv3• 9 years ago

I wish some company started promoting Lazarus. It's a great product and has a wonderful community, but the whole project somehow lacks enough traction to make it a serious alternative to more mainstream tools. I bet the moment a big player backs it up the attitude of developers will change. You can really produce prototypes of native apps rapidly.

johnhattan• 9 years ago

I'd also think "It's $1400 cheaper than Delphi" would be a good selling point.

I started using Turbo Pascal in college when it was $49. Given that Embarcadero Delphi is competing with a lot of stuff that is free and high-quality, I doubt it's got anywhere to go but down from here.

pjmlp10• 9 years ago

I payed around 100 € (direct conversion) for Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5, back in the day.

One reason Borland lost us was when they decided to go after the enterprise market, with comparable prices.

jacmoe6• 9 years ago

Lazarus and Free Pascal has made me return to the wonderful world of RAD and Object Pascal. :)

I was a Delphi addict in the 90's. After Borland screwed up Delphi - including the Kylix disaster - and since I am now a full time Linux user - Lazarus is the only option.

I have been following the Lazarus / Free Pascal project for years, and I think now is a good time to pick it up.

I wish that it had more traction, though.

johnsea• 9 years ago

No traction because it's a mess. No git, no markdown, no clear organization, dated look in almost everything. Very unuserfriedly to just 'hop in'. No money unfortunately and most (all?) devs do it in their sparetime. Splitted between different attempts, FreePascal, MSE, Oxygene, Smartpascal, Newpascal, maybe more?

Nevertheless, Lazarus and Free Pascal is very good and important work. Wish they would modernize to the 21 century though (but whatever works for them is fine - only it's difficult regarding the traction then).

julius• 9 years ago

I remember a tool called "Dirty Little Helper" (if I am not mistaken), which had all the Delphi answers, I would ask SO nowadays (eg. how to make a windows tray icon?) But it was an offline application.

mannykannot• 9 years ago

Verity Stob has chronicled the tribulations of Delphi enthusiasts in a series of commentaries:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/07/borland_ditches_del... ... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/20/verity_sons_of_khan...

Yuioup• 9 years ago

Delphi is dead. Nothing to see here. Move along.

interfixus2• 9 years ago

A 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?

eli2• 9 years ago

VB was worse if you included all the required DLLs.

gressquel• 9 years ago

I remember when we developed "remote administration tools" (trojans) we used Delphi but we made it as console application. The executables ended up on 15 kb for a full-featured RAT.

saganus• 9 years ago

Ahhh... the memories.

In the 90s I met this guy in IRC that used Delphi 2 to program a RAT called Hacker's Paradise.

He was very kind with me (I was much younger than him apparently) and shared the source code so I could learn from it since I was constantly asking him programming stuff.

Then later he renamed the tool "Master's Paradise" so he could go legit and sell it to companies and compete with MS BackOffice.

I enjoyed talking with him so much, even though I could barely understand OOP, but the thought of talking to a real developet left me an impression

jk49302• 9 years ago

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.

segmondy• 9 years ago

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.o

masklinn• 9 years ago

Funny thing is, I am just getting into Go, and you know what?

Hello World is 1MB?

interfixus2• 9 years ago

Exactly :)

StevePerkins• 9 years ago

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 window appear.

yoodenvranx4• 9 years ago

There's just no way to develop a GUI application (especially a cross-platform one) without shipping something large

If you compiled a Delphi program without using the UI stuff the resulting .exe files were usually only a few dozen kb in size. People used this fact in combination with using raw Win32 API in order to create very small sized UI apps with no external dependencies.

There were tons of tutorials on how to use Win32 API in combination with Delphi.

SyneRyder2• 9 years ago

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.)

libx3• 9 years ago

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.

mike_hearn4• 9 years ago

There's just no way to develop a GUI application (especially a cross-platform one) without shipping something large

That's not quite true. Check out these Avian examples:

https://readytalk.github.io/avian/

Fully statically linked Java cross-platform GUI app (using SWT) in a 1mb download.

dchest• 9 years ago

Fun fact: the icon for my macOS application is about twice as large as the binary.

criddell• 9 years ago

Cross platform applications are going to be large, but if you aren't cross platform, you can create pretty small applications.

Steve Gibson at grc.com has GUI utilities that are pretty small. For example, his DNS benchmarking tool is 165 kB.

Figs2• 9 years ago

It doesn't have to be so big. Modern GUI toolkits are just really bad about keeping their sizes down for some reason.

I wrote my own personal GUI toolkit on top of OpenGL/GLFW for developing special purpose editors (for gamedev), and the resulting executables plus required shared libraries and resources (minus system libraries like libGL that shouldn't be distributed directly with the application) are only about a megabyte or two total. That includes a full blown custom scripting language interpreter, resizable rich text widget with bold/italics/color support + optional text wrapping and scrollbars, JSON parser and serializer, vector math library, a basic image loader and saver for several formats (using stb plus a little custom code for a few less common formats), various routines for software manipulation of surfaces (e.g. drawing lines, triangles, alpha blending images, and so on)... written in C++, with debugging info turned on, and using templates where appropriate. (It'd be even smaller if I stripped debug info and packed the whole thing into one executable.) I'm developing it on Linux, but I could rebuild it for Windows (and probably Mac) without too much effort.

I don't know what the hell the GUI libraries are doing to get so big.

draegtun3• 9 years ago

> There's just no way to develop a GUI application (especially a cross-platform one) without shipping something large.

It can be done, for eg. Rebol/View, a cross-platform GUI circa 1mb in size.

NB. Rebol/View used the AGG library to achieve this - http://antigrain.com/ | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Grain_Geometry

camus2• 9 years ago

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.

pjmlp10• 9 years ago

something C doesn't do.

Sure it does, not all C compilers are like gcc with the idiosyncratics of glibc.

romanovcode• 9 years ago

Hello World in Electron will probably be around 20mb+.

Figs2• 9 years ago

More like ~100MB. At least it was the last time I tried it about 6 months ago. Might have gotten better since then.

ahacker15• 9 years ago

Delphi is still popular in the south of Brazil. It's dying, but slowly.

There's a lot a legacy application written in Delphi here. Some old programmers, that only know to program in Delphi, may even build new apps with it.

It may not be that modern today, but there's the "pay the bills" mindset.

I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today. If it had a resonable price, many people would continue to use it indeterminately.

dvfjsdhgfv3• 9 years ago

I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today.

I agree with your diagnosis. The problem is that Embarcadero doesn't understand that, and when it does (or when someone else buys Delphi), it may well be much too late to revive it. They could really position various versions of the product in a different way, making the lower tier more affordable.

tonyedgecombe4• 9 years ago

I think they do understand that, they just see their opportunity elsewhere. The reason is the only price that would satisfy the complainers is free, which isn't going to be very profitable.

There is a community of locked in customers who are wiling to pay to keep their projects going, it makes sense for Embarcadero to milk them.

nunobrito2• 9 years ago

You're right. The IDE has grown outdated, we just need the old Delphi (no .NET stuff) with an updated IDE.

Funny enough, I can produce Delphi executables that run perfectly on Linux and Mac using Wine. That means executables that run on anything from Windows 95 to any modern desktop operating systems available today.

Why the heck did they decided to kill such a good platform.

I've moved to Java back in 2010. From my perspective was the best next thing (platform agnostic, rock-solid) but still miss my Delphi IDE to create good looking UI apps with ease.

muyuu2• 9 years ago

I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today. If it had a resonable price, many people would continue to use it indeterminately.

http://www.lazarus-ide.org/

tluyben23• 9 years ago

Did you try it? I try it every year (I was a Delphi fan and full time Delphi programmer from Delph-1 to 6) but it is not very good. The Pascal compiler is brilliant and fast but Lazarus itself is unusable every time I try. It often begins by failing to build the basic form until I go through a bunch of steps to fix the install. That's going to put most people off as Delphi never had that issue; it was install-and-go. And after that it depends a bit on the position of the moon what happens. For instance, I just installed it again because of your post and when I press Run, I get http://imgur.com/a/blFNC . But even when you have it running, it keeps being highly unstable. Maybe it's just me but I doubt it.

bdavisx• 9 years ago

Just so no one else has to try to find the price (you have to search for it a little). The cheapest new user price for Delphi is USD $1,405.

vintagedave6• 9 years ago

Or $0, if you use the Starter edition. It's free for hobbyists, students, startups etc, with the clause that if you start making over a certain amount of revenue you're asked to buy it.

rgacote• 9 years ago

Yes, the cost is ridiculous. Delphi used to be an affordable tool. I've been a big fan of Delphi and would still be developing Windows apps in Delphi, except for the excessive pricing. Stopped renewing my licenses two years ago.

Delphi had the flexibility of Visual Basic without the deployment problems.

Unlike VB, all the controls and libraries were written in Delphi itself, which allowed you to walk through each and every library when debugging problems.

JohnStrange• 9 years ago

It's the same for almost all of the great programming environments of the 80s and 90s that still exist. Commercial CommonLisps are also super-expensive, so is Xojo (=Realbasic).

They should have license fees based on how much money the developer earns, but I guess it's too hard to calculate long-term revenue and to ensure that the developers don't cheat.

Arcsech• 9 years ago

I always thought the new Visual Studio pricing model was a good way to go for this: Free for teams of <=5, cost/seat for teams above that.

I suppose if you go that route you need a legal team that can afford to be on the lookout for violators though.

silveira• 9 years ago

The documentation and help pages that came with Delphi were absolutely the best documentation I ever had. Every topic came with examples that you could copy and reuse. Not just snippets but fully functional blocks of code. It was brilliant.

kozhevnikov• 9 years ago

The Stack Overflow Driven Development (SODD) model.

Elrac• 9 years ago

You've reminded me of the reason I loved Delphi's help. I think what I found most helpful (and most unusual for the "state of the art") was that most help pages had "see also" links. This allowed me to look up something similar to what I needed and just follow the links to what I really wanted.

I was able to use the Help pages as (almost?) my sole reference for the API. Something that just wasn't happening with Delphi's big competitor, VB.

bencoder• 9 years ago

That was pretty much how I learnt programming

spiralx• 9 years ago

Yes, I learnt Pascal from the Turbo Pascal docs and then moved onto Delphi from there.

johnny_reilly• 9 years ago

My first gig was writing telecoms software using Delphi 3. Good times! Then Inprise bought Borland and shipped a buggy version of Delphi 4 which was a pain. Like many others I jumped ship when I heard what Anders was doing with C#. I don't regret the move but I thought Delphi was great.

nnq• 9 years ago

Was wondering... is there any modern all-in-one RAD-tool nowadays? And if not... why?

Has there ever stopped being a need for this?

codewithcheese• 9 years ago

Does Visual Studio count?

giancarlostoro• 9 years ago

Would Qt count in this? I've made some applications with Qt Creator, aside from not knowing much C++ they were built almost like I would expect in C# , Delphi and VB6. I think C# is the successor to Delphi today, and if Microsoft makes WinForms somehow cross platform and an official part of C# it would get very interesting. The guy in charge of C# at Microsoft made Turbo Pascal and worked on Delphi back in the day as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg

nurettin• 9 years ago

It's called Delphi XE (currently 10.2)

zhte4152• 9 years ago

Half in jest and half seriousness... Excel fill this void for many many things corporate. Two decades later it is almost as good as Delphi was, just no .exe.

Havoc4• 9 years ago

Mind elaborating on this?

I used Delphi for years, now I'm working in Excel all day and I can't quite see the parallel you're describing?

tonyedgecombe4• 9 years ago

xojo (formerly Real Basic), I haven't used it but they were positioning themselves as the VB6 replacement for a long time.

pjmlp10• 9 years ago

I would .NET with Visual Studio and Blend fit that purpose quite nicely as well.

bartread7• 9 years ago

I might be a few years out of date now (no WPF since 2011) but all I remember of Blend is it was so complex to learn and use that it was easier just to hand-code my XAML. Not at all like the GUI builders of yore. That may have changed though.

libx3• 9 years ago

Try Red (www.red-lang.org)! It's not version 1.0 yet, GUI for OSX and Python is coming, for Windows and Android has already arrived. Small, light, great.

meredydd• 9 years ago

Anvil (https://anvil.works) is an all-in-one RAD tool for web apps, very much in the Delphi/VB mould. (I'm a cofounder)

mike_hearn4• 9 years ago

Well, buy IntelliJ Ultimate edition and you can go ahead and create apps like you would have done with Delphi. It has good tools for database access, rapid iteration, you can design Swing GUIs with a built in GUI designer tool, etc.

yoodenvranx4• 9 years ago

Delphi 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?

riledhel• 9 years ago

And compile times were pretty fast too

yoodenvranx4• 9 years ago

I really want to see Delphi compile times on a modern i7 and a fast SSD. For small-ish projects that should be pretty much instantaneously.

jsudhams• 9 years ago

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.

lojack3• 9 years ago

We use web apps at my company because almost all developers know how to make them, not all computers are windows PCs, and you don't need to install anything of download anything for someone to use them.

If you're talking about electron apps, that's a whole other ballgame. We don't build electron apps for internal stuff afaik.

matwood• 9 years ago

Completely agree. It's hard to beat VB6 for LOB CRUD apps.

slantyyz• 9 years ago

I miss them too. VB6 was usually the fastest way to build something that simply did the job.

Now that I'm older and can't mode switch between languages as quickly as I could when I was younger, I find myself just using Node for my personal stuff.

boondaburrah• 9 years ago

Honestly, it's because the approval required to get an executable onto an employee's computer is absurd. If we can get chrome or firefox on the system image, then all we need to do is point them at a URL. Actually adding software to their computer requires all manner of support tickets and manager approval for them, so they won't do it.

mattmanser3• 9 years ago

Deployment, it's always been about deployment.

Gone were the days of having dB passwords on every machine and wandering from PC to PC with a floppy or CD.

And that was the problem with desktop apps 10 years ago.

Even when MS fixed deployment for desktop apps they still left it massively overcomplicated. It should have been a simple one click in visual studio to build an installer and it never was.

One click deployment was/is pretty awful too that came out just as Google pioneered background updates.

metachris• 9 years ago

The strong point of Electron is easy _cross-platform_ application development and packaging (spits out .exe, .app and Linux binary), with no further dependencies. Ever tried packaging a QT application for Mac, Windows and Linux? I can tell you it's a painful experience, one I don't want to repeat.

Also HTML+CSS allows for extremely versatile styling and fine-grained control of appearance.

wtbob• 9 years ago

A weak point, though, is JavaScript — quite possibly the worst popular computer language in history. I honestly think I'd rather starve than write another line of JavaScript again. Even reading JavaScript diffs from other guys on my team is a horrible, terrible experience. It's just a sad, awful, miserable, verbose, broken language.

As a compilation target from a better language, I suppose it's mostly acceptable. But on its own? Never again.

problems2• 9 years ago

Ever tried packaging a QT application for Mac, Windows and Linux? I can tell you it's a painful experience, one I don't want to repeat.

Qt guy here... Windows and Linux are a breeze, pretty much dead simple as I thought they'd be, just run winqtdeploy, make installer out of resulting directory, copy other libraries, done. On Linux, just ship it and install dependencies on target or make a package appropriately.

OS X however is a nightmare if you need other libraries beyond Qt unless you know all the voodoo of install_name_tool. But maybe that's just my experience showing.

tvmalsv2• 9 years ago

I haven't tried the new versions, so I don't know how easy it is, but Delphi claims to do easy cross-platform now, too, for Windows, OSX, iOS, and Android.

FigBug• 9 years ago

Ever tried packaging a QT application for Mac, Windows and Linux?

How long ago? I've never done Linux, but Mac it comes with a script that does everything and spits out a .dmg. On Windows it spits out everything into a folder you can zip up or create an installer.

rubber_duck• 9 years ago

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.

marvin2• 9 years ago

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.

marvin2• 9 years ago

Windows Forms is still a completely decent option that gives you the same advantages.

zubspace• 9 years ago

I fully agree. I sometimes wonder, why so many people jump to fancy frameworks like WPF where you need to create the markup yourself. I can spit out interfaces for desktop apps in no time with good old winforms but struggle to write data-bindings, triggers and what not in other frameworks. And it even looks consistent and the tools are generally easy to adjust and extend.

bakhy• 9 years ago

i fully agree! though technically, there is a pretty big dependency there - the .NET Framework...

however, Mono supports WinForms on all platforms, and is able to compile everything into one standalone EXE. to be honest, i have not tried either, so i cannot say much about how that works in practice. from my experience with Mono, it can be dangerous. every now and then a new version breaks threading, causing mysterious pauses or crashes, and i've read (i think a text by Ayende) that the GC can also be buggy. but for the stuff that Delphi was good at, for smaller RAD apps, it might be worth a try.

theprotocol• 9 years ago

Yes! Winforms is extremely underrated these days. I find it much more productive (and efficient) than WPF.

craigvn3• 9 years ago

Windows Forms is ok, but pretty slow and clunky if you come from using Delphi.

flukus2• 9 years ago

Windows Forms was (and is) primitive compared to how easy qt/gtk and just about every windows toolkit ever made. It was built for machines to generate, not for humans to code, so when the code generation breaks (and it will) so does winforms.

ptero4• 9 years ago

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.

yoodenvranx4• 9 years ago

Now there are IMO much better cross platform tools for RAD (Python, Tcl/Tk, ...)

That's why I wrote "in combination with easy deployment". Yes, you can do faster RAD in Python but good luck with easy deployment.

vintagedave6• 9 years ago

no Linux targets?

Linux is coming in the next release - there will be a blog on that soon. It already has Mac, iOS, and Android on top of its Windows support.

Honestly, I do not believe that Python or Tcl/Tk count as "good" RAD cross-platform tools. Only if you've never used something like modern Delphi to compare them to. We regularly have customers give feedback about their productivity with Delphi/C++Builder, versus Python, C#, etc, and they say they get apps completed and released twice as fast or often more. "5x" is quoted often in our marketing material, and that number is not marketing, it's based on numbers people tell us.

- David (one of the PMs at Embarcadero; I work with the blog author Marco.)

ealexhudson• 9 years ago

They produced Kylix not that long ago - I had an original box set once upon a time. I have no idea why that didn't take off, but it was an excellent environment really.

coldtea4• 9 years ago

Now there are IMO much better cross platform tools for RAD (Python, Tcl/Tk, ...) and Delphi is showing its age

Tk is the better than Delphi RAD tool?

klipt• 9 years ago

Microsoft poached some of the top Delphi designers for C#.

As the saying goes, if you can't beat 'em...

vic20forever• 9 years ago

In 1994, I was looking at languages for a Windows GUI project, and I narrowed my options down to Borland ObjectVision (a sort-of "predecessor" to Delphi) and Visual Basic 3.0. I went with VB3 because the userbase was larger, but I've always wondered how my career would have played out if I'd chosen the other path.

jacmoe6• 9 years ago

Do you even know what RAD means?

20 years ago, RAD meant that you could drop visual components on a form, add some events, set some properties, and hit the green run button to compile and run it.

A very visual way of programming.

QtCreator with it's visual designer comes close, but then you have to suffer a more unforgiving syntax (C++), a complex macro compiler (MOC) and not at all easy cross-compilation / distribution.

anthk• 9 years ago

Now there are IMO much better cross platform tools for RAD (Python, Tcl/Tk,

TCL/TK is about 20 years old if not more.

ivm• 9 years ago

Delphi is still unrivaled when it comes to rapid GUI prototyping in combination with easy deployment.

Try Unity3d component-based uGUI that you can edit live during the "playmode". After building complex UIs in it, going back to Xcode Interface Builder is like moving from iOS to a smartphone from 2005.

statictype• 9 years ago

What went wrong that we end up with this?

Shifting of priorities.

I remember when people used to complain that Delphi executables were 'bloated' and large - 200KB was the minimum size?

At that time the complaints didn't seem absurd when we were connecting via 36k dialups.

Admittedly we have probably swung too much in the other direction.

jmiserez• 9 years ago

The apps on my phone easily reach 100MiB each, how is that the other direction?

erikpukinskis5• 9 years ago

Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this?

I'll tell you. Microsoft and Apple need to protect their native app license revenue, so they hobbled Netscape, brought browser development in house, and made a prohibition on allowing web pages to be integrated tightly into the OS.

If those electron apps could get the same OS integration in the browser as native apps get, the distributable could be kilobytes, even smaller than your Delphi executable.

But how would Microsoft and Apple make money if they're just a host for web apps? They're not going to turn themselves into a commodity/utility.

iajrz• 9 years ago

Microsoft and Apple need to protect their native app license revenue

I don't really understand. I never paid a license to create and distribute native applications.

cwyers2• 9 years ago

This seems... backwards. What integration could MS give to web apps that they aren't already? Microsoft replaced their help file format with HTML starting with Vista. HTML and JS are first-class languages for building UWP apps. If anything, it's Netscape's lawsuit against MS for bundling IE that kept them from doing more to integrate web pages into the OS, not the moving of browser development in-house.

efdee• 9 years ago

I don't think they can tightly integrate web pages into their OS after the whole antitrust thing.

craigvn3• 9 years ago

2005 called and want's it's arguments back. Microsoft has been moving a lot of products to the web where possible, for example Office 365.

dfox6• 9 years ago

There is simple counterargument: there is integrated runtime for webapps in windows since at least windows 98 (probably since 95 desktop update bundled with IE4). Just rename HTML file to .hta. Running that gets you IE window without any browser UI and scripts in the page run outside any sandbox and can interact with windows API anyway they want. Various windows components are exactly this.

flukus2• 9 years ago

Back when MS was hobbling netscape web apps weren't a possibility, machines simply did not have enough memory to run them.

draegtun3• 9 years ago

Rebol/View (& SDK) was a great alternative. An extremely light weight language, library & cross-platform GUI (exe was under 1mb). Ideal for very rapid GUI prototyping...

* http://www.rebol.com/rebol-view.html

* http://www.rebol.com/docs/sdk/

* http://re-bol.com/business_programming.html

NB. I say "was" because Rebol 2 SDK has (i believe) been discontinued. Rebol 3 & Red do offer new GUI / encapping replacements but not at same level of maturity.

masterponomo• 9 years ago

I 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. For them, a PC with Clipper and Turbo Pascal was plenty advanced enough for small business apps. Dad never did go for Delphi. 20+ years later, I'm doing a quick study of Object Pascal to prep for working on a legacy application at my work, in Delphi.

pjmlp10• 9 years ago

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.

mike_hearn4• 9 years ago

Hah, that's how I started programming too. A bit of BASIC. Then I graduated to Clipper and Turbo Pascal because that's what my dad used. Then to Delphi 1.0, then 2.0, I think we skipped 3. Delphi 4 was a mess. Quality got pretty variable in the later releases.

Imagine being 14 and trying to understand CORBA.

mmargerum• 9 years ago

I used Clipper back in the day. CA ruined it when they bought it. I was waiting for CA's new product "visual objects" in the meantime Delphi shipped and I've been using it since Delphi 1. I think it's unparalleled for building desktop applications for Mac and windows.

adam-falafel• 9 years ago

My first job out of college was as a tech support intern for Delphi, first answering pre-sales and installation calls, and eventually moving up to answering paid support calls. From there, I joined a consulting company and wrote and maintained LOB applications written in Delphi. Good times. Jumped ship to .NET in 2003.

barking2• 9 years ago

Back then there was no internet and I knew no programmers. I remember seeing the yellow borland boxes at PC World and not really understanding what borland were. Afterwards I bought my first copy of vb secondhand (lots of manuals came with it), from someone who was getting into Delphi instead.

b4xt3em4n• 9 years ago

The best environment I've used to build software.

lunchladydoris• 9 years ago

I love the magazine scans. They're almost always a good reminder of how much things have changed, and how cheap things have become.

Havoc4• 9 years ago

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.

hsitz2• 9 years ago

I don't think many ever thought the language itself was ever "the best". It was the way the libraries and visual components (together, the "VCL") were designed, and the way things worked within the IDE, that many thought made Delphi the best. The Delphi/ObjectPascal language on its own, however, was pretty good.

Havoc4• 9 years ago

It was the way the libraries and visual components (together, the "VCL") were designed

Agreed. One thing that prevented me from loving python. The language was great...but how the fk do I get a clickable button without some mish-mash of half developed 3rd party libraries?

nottorp• 9 years ago

I can't help but notice that all the article talks about is Delphi versions up to 6... which is where it started to go downhill.

Are recent versions of Delphi actually usable? I haven't tried anything beyond 8, and from my (admittedly rusty) experience the best version was 6.

hsitz2• 9 years ago

Back in early 2000's when I used it a lot, the word was that the even numbered versions of Delphi (2, 4, 6) were all poor efforts, and the odd numbered (3,5,7) were all good. I used 6 and didn't think it was bad, but 7 was better. Many Delphi users had remained at version 5.

kol4• 9 years ago

6 and 7 were both great.

TimJYoung3• 9 years ago

The latest Seattle and Berlin versions have pretty solid IDEs that start up very quickly and the runtime/VCL has seen a lot of improvements/fixes over the last few years.

pjmlp10• 9 years ago

Delphi was a great environment, but Anders and other key persons leaving Borland, while the company lost track which customers they should target, besides the "clever" idea to change the company's name, killed it.

I know of a few companies in Germany and Netherlands that still use it, but it is hard to get offers.

And we had to wait 15 years until .NET started to offer a compilation model similar to Delphi (only for UWP apps).

While Java kind of outsourced it to third party JDK vendors due to Sun's attitude against AOT compilation, oh well at least Java 9 will bring the first steps towards support it.

agentgt• 9 years ago

While Java kind of outsourced it to third party JDK vendors due to Sun's attitude against AOT compilation, oh well at least Java 9 will bring the first steps towards support it.

I'm just curious. How would AOT improve Java's ability to have better RAD. I guess I'm just missing the association. Is it bundling/distribution? Startup time? Integration with native libraries?

I would imagine hot code swap probably doesn't work with AOT (aka JRebel) so that would hurt RAD.

pjmlp10• 9 years ago

Java has worse RAD support than Delphi, yet Delphi AOT compiles to native code.

AOT compiling to native code, as standard option, would have improved Java's acceptance as safe language for desktop applications, due to better bundling, distribution and startup time.

To the point that even Oracle does reckonize this, and is delivering an initial way of partially AOT compiling on GNU/Linux x64, with support for other platforms planned for Java 10.

I would imagine hot code swap probably doesn't work with AOT (aka JRebel) so that would hurt RAD.

Sure it does, that can be done with dynamic libraries. Many game engines make use of this approach.

Other environments like Eiffel and Lisp, have a set of JIT/AOT compilers, JIT during development and AOT for deployment.

vram222• 9 years ago

Somewhat long and interesting thread about Delphi from a while ago, on HN:

Delphi – why won't it die? (2013) (stevepeacocke.blogspot.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613543

Did a search in hn.algolia.com just now to find the thread, and it was the top result when the setting was "By popularity":

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=delphi&sort=byPopularity&prefi...

alex_duf2• 9 years ago

I remember using Delphi 2 when I was younger, that's how I learned programming. If you don't mind hearing my personal story, keep reading, otherwise move on to another comment.

By an interesting coincidence I was given a CD with tons of software on it, including Delphi 2. I started playing with it and quickly realised I could create my own programs using that tool.

Later I went to the book store and found a book about it that I couldn't afford. So I came back every week to read as much as I could, then heading back home to try it on my illegal copy of Delphi. (I was 11)

Then I realised there was a help manual embedded in the distribution, so I learned as much English as I could so I could understand that manual.

Little by little I learned about conditions, loops, object programming and made a bunch of terribly crappy yet working games.

No amount of studies could have taught me as much as I learned through using that software. No manual work could have given me the fun I had when programming my very own games. Reading "Delphi" as a headline on hacker news made me feel nostalgic and I figured I'd share my story here.

So thanks Borland, the 11 year old me may not have paid to use that software, but it was enough of a revelation to make me the programmer I am today.

mateuszf• 9 years ago

Hey, it sounds very similar to how I learned programming. That's how I started too, apart from the fact that I had a simple Turbo Pascal book from the beginning, but I also learned writing programs using an illegal Delphi 2 CD.

pmarreck2• 9 years ago

Nice!

For me it was Microsoft BASIC on the early Macintosh and this magical book from 1985: https://smile.amazon.com/Macintosh-Midnight-Madness-Utilitie... (Wow, I can't find the actual cover art anywhere! It was much cooler than what's shown there.)

svenfaw• 9 years ago

http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/161789449967-0-1/s-l1000.jpg

marcosdumay2• 9 years ago

so I learned as much English as I could so I could understand that manual.

I started learning English as a kid to understand what was happening on the MS BASIC programs I could get on my computer by the time.

mseebach• 9 years ago

I remember the penny dropping when I learned what "if" meant in English (I already knew what it did in BASIC).

irfanka• 9 years ago

Same thing here! I never would've learned English if it wasn't for GW BASIC and Windows 98 - certainly not in the crappy schools of the post-war Bosnia!

schnable• 9 years ago

This is pretty much my story as well, I learned how to program for real on Delphi 2. Though I was able to get someone to buy me the book. Thanks for sharing.

treve• 9 years ago

For me it was Turbo Pascal 5.5. It was amazing!

neves• 9 years ago

Years of boring english courses, but I really learned when I had to read the manual of my TRS-Color!

alain_gilbert• 9 years ago

Same story here !

For nostalgia's sake, may I ask what games/software you developed at the time ?

On my end, I did:

  - Snake, and a Snake level editor,
  - Sokoban, and a Sokoban level editor,
  - an adventure game Zelda (NES) alike (but was not fun at all !)
  - Graphic calculator (to help me visualize the change of parameters quickly),
  - a software to visualize my grades compared to the rest of the group
  - I made a software to search and categorize html tags

(during my high school years)

What impressed me the most at the time, was that my binary file compiled on Windows ME would work directly on my other computer with Windows 3.1.

This is something I still really enjoy today with Go(lang); the fact that I can just compile for other platforms and run it natively.

RodericDay• 9 years ago

This is one thing I really really liked about Go, but unfortunately I don't really like the rest of Go very much. What are other languages that have this property? Building an ".exe" I can send to a Windows user is not a pleasant exercise in Python.

alex_duf2• 9 years ago

It's really cool to see how many people shared the same experience!

In random order, and off the top of my head:

    - pong
    - some various demo where I would simulate fireworks or 
      traveling through star (in other words particles that are
      rendered by drawing dots and circles on screen)
    - a car racing game viewed from the top
    - an RPG engine but never actually made a level
    - a claw machine
    - and finally my own remake of space invader where you could
      play up to 4 in coop and upgrade your weapons. It had bosses
      and swarms of enemies. I learn then there was a limit of how
      many keys you can press on a keyboard before your computer starts beeping.

amadeusw• 9 years ago

Ditto! I feel the same way. I learned both English and programming on Delphi 3. The first program I wrote showed and hid a picture on the screen. I wrote a few games, but didn't understand types and generics until years later.

desireco42• 9 years ago

This is such an awesome story! Good for you and your initiative, going to bookstore every day to read the book.

I came from Turbo Pascal, it was never the same but Delphi was such an awesome environment that I enjoyed making things with it.

dfox6• 9 years ago

I started programming in basic (first on ZX spectrum clone, then QBasic) but really started writing meaningful programs in BP7 and then Delphi. On the other hand I'm pretty sure that I learned english by printing out the whole readme for Build engine that was on the Duke Nukem 3D CD and reading that.

gerryk2• 9 years ago

This sounds like me, except the year was 1986, and the software on the bunch of floppies was Borland Turbo Pascal. Included photocopied manuals too.

alsadi• 9 years ago

my favorite color is better than yours.

Would someone please point to his/her blog saying that Tcl/tk being the universal scripting language?

jacmoe6• 9 years ago

Do you know who Marco Cantu is? Apparently not. ;)

duracel• 9 years ago

Delphi was much more better choice than many others in 90's and early 2000. Fast compiler and quite optimised binaries also.

snarfy• 9 years ago

If I had to write a native COM application in Windows, I'd still use Delphi.

bigtunacan2• 9 years ago

I never used Delphi, but I have a couple of friends that were die hard Delphi fanatics. Eventually they moved on to C# as all of the Delphi jobs dried up with Delphi's continually decreasing use. They still swore how they thought it was the best thing they ever worked with, but at the end of the day you have to pay the bills.

Maybe it really is great, I don't know. I was a bit surprised looking at Tiobe (http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/) that they rank it as the 9th most popular language right now. Where is this actually being used? And the price tag is incredible!

marcocantu4• 9 years ago

Delphi is used a lot, desktop has first class Win10 support (store included) and mobile clients are cross-platform. Also fast server code -- now coming to Linux. Skype for Windows is still written in Delphi! But I'm very biased

VLM3• 9 years ago

I've seen it appear in bottom-up development areas. Top down would be the COBOL(s) of the 21st century that being Java or PHP/Javascript. Very little seems to come from non-software company megacorp enterprise HQ that isn't Java, PHP, or Javascript.

The very bottom tier of bottom up development is making business critical systems depend on Excel and some impenetrable write only undebugable macros. The next tier up is where I've see Delphi apps mostly in sorta integrative and peculiar reporting roles. Oh and ETL of all places too.

At least that's where I've seen it. It works well there, too.

kol4• 9 years ago

It's used a lot since there are lots of legacy apps written in Delphi. You can't throw away hundreds of thousands or more lines of code just because Delphi "went out of fashion" (I know the situation is more complex than that, though).

TimJYoung3• 9 years ago

When you're making half a million or more each year writing vertical market software, the price tag for a Delphi/RAD Studio license each year is irrelevant. This is especially true when Delphi was the reason why you're making all that money in the first place.

It's kind of a "you had to have been there..." type of story, but if you get a chance, talk to a developer that was trying to create Windows applications for businesses back in the 90's and you will know what I mean. The really sad part is that while .NET and C# have done an okay job of providing a replacement (I think that MS has a hard time staying on-point when it comes to dev tools and make their tools too much of a moving target), you really cannot find anything exactly like Delphi/RAD Studio today. The primary reason why it's so sad is that Delphi created millions upon millions of dollars of revenue for independent software vendors all over the world, and you would think that companies would be trying to replicate that success. Alas, it's hard to contemplate even attempting such an endeavor when developer tools are not valued properly according to the money that they make the developer. If the software world finds a way to start making money from developer tools again, then you'll see another Delphi and it will be a lot cheaper.

codewritinfool• 9 years ago

As a pascal user since the early 80's, then an Object Pascal user, then a Delphi user since the first version, I love Delphi but to be honest I cannot afford the yearly updates.

For someone that uses it for home projects, $916 for an upgrade is out of the question.

Rambling here, but... Delphi 3/5/7 were incredible design packages. I feel they lost focus when they jumped on the .NET bandwagon - maybe it is just my perception, but maybe some of their internal developers were less focused on native code. Anders leaving was also a big hit. Kylix was yet another distraction.

marcocantu4• 9 years ago

For home projects, the Starter edition is free.

Karunamon3• 9 years ago

Sure, if you don't want to build UWP apps, or 64 bit apps(!), or OSX apps... the list[1] goes on.

[1] https://www.embarcadero.com/docs/rad-studio-berlin-feature-m...

shakna• 9 years ago

Lazarus [0] and FreePascal [1]?

Free Pascal tries to implement a Borland compatible pascal compiler on as many platforms as possible.

[0] http://www.lazarus-ide.org/

[1] http://www.freepascal.org/

huan9huan• 9 years ago

After several years programming and using Borland, finally, I got to know what "Turbo" meaning (I am Chinese for not good in English)

tmsldd• 9 years ago

Thanks for making me feel so old... we had a programming lecture twice a week and I was carrying one of those 10 kg "Delphi The Bible" book in my backpacks... that made me feel like a programmer somehow.

jksmith• 9 years ago

I've written tons and tons of code in Delphi and remember it fondly. A few issues I had with it toward the end included Hjelsberg turning it into a kitchen sink, me too language, much like IMO the direction C# has gone in, and walking into projects with tons of business logic right behind the forms, empty except blocks, and codebase full of warnings when compiled. Fix your warnings people.

eli_gottlieb• 9 years ago

I got my start programming with Delphi 5. It was an excellent environment to learn in, since I could always see something happening based on what I had done.

Better: the Delphi component libraries made writing a GUI application easy. I've never seen anything of their quality and ease up through today, and I still miss being able to get an application running by just subclassing some standard components and writing the core logic I needed.

reitanqild2• 9 years ago

I guess I should have started on a greenfield project.

For me it was less rosy.

I remember my boss trying to get me started on Delphi.

We basically had two or three Delphi developer workstations available because setting up one that could compile the projects we had in our vcs was a three day task - and it was only possible with the help of our resident Delphi consultant.

Stuff like that has made me love Maven and Java.

Same goes for Visual Basic that I once used to love.

Still I feel I could have loved it if I didn't start with 10 years of accumulated references to unsupported packages. :-/

Joeri5• 9 years ago

The way delphi finds its units is similar to how java finds its classes, so it can be smooth sailing or an absolute nightmare depending on how the project is laid out.

reitanqild2• 9 years ago

Unlike how Java finds it classes I have clear memories about installing things that would update stuff in the registry.

analognoise• 9 years ago

Shout-out to Lazarus/FreePascal. It is like all the best parts of Delphi 5-7, and it is open source, free, and you can make commercial applications in it!

I have started using it in earnest and it is wonderful - and a company can never take it away from you; there's no "we're shifting focus..." announcements. No paid support for broken updates.

I honestly can't recommend it enough.

ziotom78• 9 years ago

I can confirm this. I have used it a couple of years ago for a GUI app I needed at work (1): Lazarus was a real time saver! When a colleague asked me if he could use my app under Windows, the porting process was 100% painless: all the code (~1000 lines of code) recompiled in an instant and the application worked like a charm.

(1) https://github.com/ziotom78/hpview/blob/master/README.md

boznz4• 9 years ago

+1 Amazing IDE and yes I have made a couple of commercial applications in it now :-)

Animats• 9 years ago

I just ported an old Pascal program to Free Pascal, and it went very well. It's a nice system.

jug2• 9 years ago

Also FreePascal does dependency free compiles to a crapload of platforms. Crazy! So crazy this could be a use case by itself.

frik• 9 years ago

I started with QuickBasic/QBasic and Pascal. Though I went with VB4-6 instead of Delphi.

It's sad that RAD isn't popular anymore. 1995 - 1999 was great with Win95 era, everything was so consistent, good documentation. Then Microsoft realised their "The Microsoft Network" lost against the open free WWW and then the announced dotNet (which took until 2003 for them to release v1) - that was the beginning of the end of the great Win32 platform and RAD. HTML with Frontpage and Dreamweaver was just an okay RAD andbthe situation got worse with "no tables, use div" and XHTML 1/2 movements.

danarmak• 9 years ago

RAD with WinForms was alive and well for many years after in the .Net era.

soundwave106• 9 years ago

Very true, even now. The professional market for WinForms is probably dead, though.

Yet ironically, I use Winforms in personal code way more today than any of Microsoft's other GUI technologies. Winforms is a great way to get a Windows app up extremely quickly that needed a simple GUI. There are plenty of ways to get a quick command line style app up, but I really don't know too many solutions that allow you to drag and drop functional GUIs as quickly as Winforms (other than VB and Delphi).

For a fully fledged app, Winforms makes no sense to me these days. But Microsoft specific syntax like WPF or UWP no longer makes that much sense to me either. Might as well spend the time on HTML+CSS+Javascript and get cross-platform support...

mamcx2• 9 years ago

I'm moderator in one of the oldest/largest delphi forum in latin-america:

http://clubdelphi.com/

Ironically, I don't use Delphi anymore. Yet, I still help people with it and defend it when is possible.

Delphi is amazing. It only have a HUGE problem: His owners.

You can re4ad why Delphi fade away here: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Borland-fail?share=1

"Borland lost its way when executive management decided to change the company to pursue a different market. ... ... In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yocam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yocam replied without hesitation "Absolutely."

kofejnik• 9 years ago

yep, just checked, minimal useful Delphi license is ~$1500, which is a non-starter for most people outside of corporate environment

consequently, you can never just pick it up and grow into it, you only learn it on the job which already uses it

or maybe, you torrent it

vintagedave6• 9 years ago

There is a free version. Download Starter.

bsder• 9 years ago

In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yocam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yocam replied without hesitation "Absolutely."

And he is 100% correct. It's way easier to double the profit from 100 customers than it is 1 million.

mamcx2• 9 years ago

Correct only for money. But a language MUST go for reach.

Is no that is bad to try to catch the fat-money, is that them forget the rest.

This make Delphi fade. And impossible to some of us to even continue using it.

---

The current free version is something new, however this have been try before but never consistently, so is unsure if I get Delphi free now it will continue.

This make risky to get it.

ChuckMcM• 9 years ago

I was just having this conversation with an acquaintance about the software glut. When you do something well, you don't have to do it again, just enough to keep it compatible with the other things it needs to work with. So it takes a team of 50 people to make a product and then 10 people to maintain it forever. So where do those 40 people go?

The latest answer has been annual licenses.

igivanov2• 9 years ago

Hey Marco, I still have your Delphi 5 book :-)

FWIIW, where I work, I started using Delphi 5 when it came out. As of now we have about a dozen D5 desktop applications all essential for the core business that are in active use and supported as necessary, running happily on Windows 10. I don't see why it won't continue like this for another 15 years... The bosses (who are non-programmers) don't really care that D5 is out of fashion - because it all just works (and rocks).

The only reason I couldn't upgrade to a later version (Unicode is one thing that would be useful) is I am stuck with one critical and long discontinued grid component.

Looking back I am not sure how we could have lived w/o Delphi. Well maybe it's an exaggeration, but certainly life would have been more difficult. Everything else from before .NET/C#/Windows Forms looks like a nightmare.

kol4• 9 years ago

I am stuck with one critical and long discontinued grid component

Try to replace it with Virtual TreeView: http://www.jam-software.com/virtual-treeview/ https://github.com/Virtual-TreeView/Virtual-TreeView/

igivanov2• 9 years ago

I know about this one and others, thanks. The problem is TopGrid, it is further customized, so flexible and so entrenched in my code that it would be an enormous undertaking to replace it. Even if UI was perfectly separated from the business logic, which it isn't :-)

brunock222• 9 years ago

12 years ago I did a rude system, part of it using Delphi 7.

They still need, once every 6 months, to compile the EXE file with a small change.

I get paid monthly just to press CTRL+F9 (generate new .EXE file) every 6 months, basically.

I liiiike it :)

krylon• 9 years ago

I've mentioned it before, but I'll repeat it. ;-)

At work, I inherited maintenance of an in-house application a coworker that left the company wrote for our accounting department. In Delphi.

When people speak highly of Delphi, they always mention how great the IDE is. Personally, I am not a big fan of IDEs. I was not disappointed, but my mainly, what I do is read and edit the source code.

And I have to admit, that part was a pleasant surprise! I had never looked at or touched Pascal code before, but I was able to make a change to the source - and it worked, the very first time! - within a few days. And the majority of that time was spent figuring out how the code was structured[1] and what the accountants wanted me to do (they always talk to me as if I knew the first thing about accounting).

But after that, it was smooth sailing. It sure helped that my predecessor wrote very readable code, but it seems that ObjectPascal made it very easy to write it that way.

Or, more briefly: Happy Birthday!

[1] The application is about a 10 KLOC in total, which is not small in my book, but not "very large", either. Also, I was both a developer and a sysadmin and a helpdesk monkey, so the phone was ringing about every fifteen minutes.

Joeri5• 9 years ago

I learned VB3 at 13, and moved to delphi at 14. It was amazing. As easy as VB, but all the power of C++. I made my own DLL's to use in VB, just because I could. It was the coolest thing ever.

Fast forward years later, and plenty of intermediate languages (C, C++, Java, ...) I got hired into my first professional software developer job ... as a delphi developer in a company with a big multi-million line delphi codebase they wanted to migrate to the web. I had done some web development, so I ended up writing features on both the delphi and web teams, often the same feature. So I became intimately familiar with the trade-offs of delphi vs web development.

The thing about delphi: it was/is insanely productive. In the beginning it took about 3 to 5 times as long to write a comparable feature on the web side. It ended up driving me to research cutting edge web dev techniques to find some way to approach the productivity levels that delphi gave. In the end we almost got there, using rich frameworks and a component-driven UI. But to this day the delphi team can still get a feature done faster than the web team, and that's despite an IDE which is much weaker than webstorm/intellij. Object Pascal and the VCL are just that good.

However, I wouldn't do a new project in Delphi. You're locked into an ever more expensive product with an uncertain future, and the productivity advantages just aren't worth it anymore. You can get close enough using an open source dev stack, and the value of having all your tools be open and free is significant.

fithisux3• 9 years ago

People seem to forget that some Delphi libraries are intertwined with assembly and work around Delphi inefficiencies. This made some libraries very hard to port to FreePascal. A typical example is DevC++ and its dependencies.

pcunite• 9 years ago

Delphi 6 "Personal Edition" was my intro into Pascal. I absolutely loved it.

netrap• 9 years ago

Free Pascal/Lazarus is great. Glad they finally have Delphi Starter free but still it's not enough and the limits suck.

no_wizard• 9 years ago

Admittedly I haven't used Delphi but his reminds me of learning to program with realBASIC (Xojo).

The book with the IDE was free and easy enough to comprehend and it introduced all the basics of OOP.

Great times. I wonder if lots of people have had this same experience with VB .NET

jenkstom• 9 years ago

I too often see a fundamental misunderstanding of what made Delphi so great. Yes, you can drag and drop controls onto a form in a lot of tools. It can compile native code. And yes, Object Pascal was nice to read and maintain.

But the real issue is rapid database applications. Being able to create business apps very rapidly was always Delphi's thing. It was a really fantastic replacement for Paradox and brought Turbo Pascal and Paradox together to create something amazing.

For that there still isn't anything. There are a lot of things that are close, but nothing with the same level of power and speed. The closest thing I've found is Django. Hopefully that clarifies: it's not about GUI anything.

eggy• 9 years ago

I've used Lazarus and it's amazing, however I'm hoping Red lang becomes the new Delphi in a way.

mmgutz• 9 years ago

I remember Borland vs Ms

    Delphi vs VB
    TASM vs MASM
    Borland C++ OWL vs Microsfot C++/MFC
    Philippe Khan vs Gates

Delphi was the raddest RAD tool. The free VCL components for it were often better than commercial VB ActiveX components. Delphi executables were faster. Delphi could statically link everything.

I eventually had to move to VB when my Delphi job dried up. VB felt like a downgrade. I remember constantly referring to Dan Appleman's book so I could use Win32 APIs to work around the limitations of VB. I'm not knocking VB as it's one of my favorite tools too, but Delphi was the cream of the crop.

gerryk2• 9 years ago

I used to code in Clipper in a past life. Many ex-Clipper devs became Delphi devs when the Great Fragmentation happened (multiple competing OO frameworks for Clipper).

orionblastar• 9 years ago

I learned UCSD Pascal on an Apple 2e, and then Turbo Pascal on an IBM PC XT in high school. 1984 to 1986. It helped me learn more languages like Ada, we had Janus Ada for DOS.

Delphi 1.02 I got from some CD in a UK magazine sold in the USA. They gave away free copies of commerical software for buying the magazine for $10 or so.

I did better in Visual Basic because I got jobs that required it.

22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

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