5 ms·

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 t

by ptero 10y 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.

yoodenvranx 10y 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.
- aidenn0 10y ago
  Tcl/Tk is trivial to deploy; on linux and OS X, wish already exists and tclkit makes it easy to deploy in windows.
vintagedave 10y 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.)
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  > Only if you've never used something like modern Delphi to compare them to. The last time I used Delphi it was on version 5. I never used anything for desktop GUIs on Python or Tcl/Tk (or any other language) that comes even close to it. That requirement of "modern" is too outreaching. But I'm impressed by Python's kivy (but still didn't really use it), and there are some interesting things happening on Haskell circles. I'm optimist in that Delphi's decades old title may fall soon.
- emcrazyone 10y ago
  They had a Linux port at one time. It was called Kylix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Kylix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Kylix Developing on Linux desktop at that time probably wasn't ready for this.
  - geoelectric 10y ago
    There were some other issues then (I worked for Borland at the time, QAing Kylix) including not really understanding the FOSS community and GPL-the-social-movement part very well. There was a particularly big flap over them not stripping the corporate audit clause from the free Kylix Open Edition version targeted at OSS dev; and another regarding enforcing the mandatory "Made with Kylix Open Edition" splash screen that was linked into your app at the compiler level, since all the library code was technically modifiable per licensing. I also seem to recall that they managed to standardize on Red Hat 7.2, which I think had the much maligned gcc 2.96 fork in it and possibly an older glibc, and then had problems with later kernel/glibc/something along those lines versions such that you were locked into the "bad" version of Red Hat using it. I probably have some of the tech details jumbled 16 years later, but the TL;DR was that the development community for Linux is nothing like the development community for Windows, especially back then. There were simply different cultural expectations and a hugely diverse set of environments to target, along with a swiftly moving ecosystem to link against. Upshot, Kylix more or less flopped and Borland switched gears to Java/JBuilder-based IDEs for C++ compilation (C++BuilderX), then back around full circle later focusing on single-platform IDEs for .NET/native Windows.
- 10y ago
ealexhudson 10y 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.
- barking 10y ago
  kylix came out in 2001. That's verging on medieval :)
  - baq 10y ago
    yeah i remember reading about kylix in a paper magazine.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > I have no idea why that didn't take off, but it was an excellent environment really. - It was a wrapper around Qt - Had some dependencies on Wine - The set of available controls was small - It was closed source - They expected GNU/Linux developers to be willing to pay for it
  - dfox 10y ago
    To clarify: dependency on wine means that the IDE was essentially windows application (stripped-down delphi) running on top of wine . Wine was not required for deployment of applications.
- squarefoot 10y ago
  Kylix was doomed from day one; I saw an official presentation (IIRC by Marco Cantù himself) ages ago and was shocked by its slugginess. At that time I was playing with Delphi2 at home and using Delphi 4 at work, and both of them literally run circles around Kylix. Today Delphi on Linux to me is called Lazarus. Some nasty bugs plaguing it are long gone since like 3 years and is very stable at the moment. You can even install it on a ARM based board (Orange PI PC here) which means it doesn't simply cross compile the code but the IDE itself runs on ARM architecture!
coldtea 10y 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?
- ptero 10y ago
  The beauty is in the eye of the beholder (and I put IMOs liberally in my post). The OP mentioned GUI prototyping and I was viewing Tk in this context. For rapid prototyping, Tk is a better solution for me, by far. It is a very simple, script language that allows creating dynamic GUIs on the fly. I can make a simple GUI and hang calls on buttons and menus with a few lines of text. No compiling. No library mismatches to deal with. Whiteboard sketch to a working prototype often takes less than an hour, almost never more than a day. It is cross platform and text based, so we can email prototypes around for people to try it on their Windows, Linux and Mac machines, click on buttons and report what they want to change. It is text, and does not require installing software. This is a noticeable advantage in locked-down environments, where installing Tk once and running 10 scripts is much easier than installing 10 revs of software. Due to the language simplicity we had people who said they have no idea about it (and no plans to learn it -- they just wanted a prototype) making and sending back mods within a few days of getting the prototype. This is great -- then we know that this is what they want. Tk is long in the tooth and has many limitations, but for rapid GUI prototyping it is one of the most useful tools for me.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >It is a very simple, script language that allows creating dynamic GUIs on the fly. Very limited ones. And ones clients will have a shock when seeing. And still coding it all together. With Delphi you can drag and drop great looking (and more full featured) prototypes in zero time. It will be limited to Windows, though, I'll give you that.
    - ptero 10y ago
      Clients having a shock after seeing a prototype says a lot about the author and very little about the language the code was written in. Can you clarify "coding it all together" part. I have no idea what you meant.
klipt 10y ago
Microsoft poached some of the top Delphi designers for C#. As the saying goes, if you can't beat 'em...
- vram22 10y ago
  "That lead architect was:" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614808
vic20forever 10y 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.
- atombender 10y ago
  You're probably thinking of Object Windows Library (OWL) [1], a C++ library that was available to both Turbo Pascal for Windows and Borland C++, and which was briefly available for other platforms, including several Unix variants. Borland also had the older Turbo Vision toolkit, but that was for MS-DOS. OWL was designed a very similar class hiearchy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Windows_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Windows_Library
  - jacmoe 10y ago
    Please search before jumping to conclusions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ObjectVision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ObjectVision :)
jacmoe 10y 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.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  You could try Free Pascal related Lazarus instead. Netbeans Swing support also comes close.
  - jacmoe 10y ago
    I have been following Lazarus / Free Pascal for years - and, as it turns out, started using it in earnest one week ago. It's great! :)
anthk 10y 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.

by ptero 10y ago

yoodenvranx 10y 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.

aidenn0 10y ago
Tcl/Tk is trivial to deploy; on linux and OS X, wish already exists and tclkit makes it easy to deploy in windows.

vintagedave 10y 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.)

marcosdumay 10y ago
> Only if you've never used something like modern Delphi to compare them to. The last time I used Delphi it was on version 5. I never used anything for desktop GUIs on Python or Tcl/Tk (or any other language) that comes even close to it. That requirement of "modern" is too outreaching. But I'm impressed by Python's kivy (but still didn't really use it), and there are some interesting things happening on Haskell circles. I'm optimist in that Delphi's decades old title may fall soon.
emcrazyone 10y ago
They had a Linux port at one time. It was called Kylix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Kylix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Kylix Developing on Linux desktop at that time probably wasn't ready for this.
- geoelectric 10y ago
  There were some other issues then (I worked for Borland at the time, QAing Kylix) including not really understanding the FOSS community and GPL-the-social-movement part very well. There was a particularly big flap over them not stripping the corporate audit clause from the free Kylix Open Edition version targeted at OSS dev; and another regarding enforcing the mandatory "Made with Kylix Open Edition" splash screen that was linked into your app at the compiler level, since all the library code was technically modifiable per licensing. I also seem to recall that they managed to standardize on Red Hat 7.2, which I think had the much maligned gcc 2.96 fork in it and possibly an older glibc, and then had problems with later kernel/glibc/something along those lines versions such that you were locked into the "bad" version of Red Hat using it. I probably have some of the tech details jumbled 16 years later, but the TL;DR was that the development community for Linux is nothing like the development community for Windows, especially back then. There were simply different cultural expectations and a hugely diverse set of environments to target, along with a swiftly moving ecosystem to link against. Upshot, Kylix more or less flopped and Borland switched gears to Java/JBuilder-based IDEs for C++ compilation (C++BuilderX), then back around full circle later focusing on single-platform IDEs for .NET/native Windows.
10y ago

ealexhudson 10y 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.

barking 10y ago
kylix came out in 2001. That's verging on medieval :)
- baq 10y ago
  yeah i remember reading about kylix in a paper magazine.
pjmlp 10y ago
> I have no idea why that didn't take off, but it was an excellent environment really. - It was a wrapper around Qt - Had some dependencies on Wine - The set of available controls was small - It was closed source - They expected GNU/Linux developers to be willing to pay for it
- dfox 10y ago
  To clarify: dependency on wine means that the IDE was essentially windows application (stripped-down delphi) running on top of wine . Wine was not required for deployment of applications.
squarefoot 10y ago
Kylix was doomed from day one; I saw an official presentation (IIRC by Marco Cantù himself) ages ago and was shocked by its slugginess. At that time I was playing with Delphi2 at home and using Delphi 4 at work, and both of them literally run circles around Kylix. Today Delphi on Linux to me is called Lazarus. Some nasty bugs plaguing it are long gone since like 3 years and is very stable at the moment. You can even install it on a ARM based board (Orange PI PC here) which means it doesn't simply cross compile the code but the IDE itself runs on ARM architecture!

coldtea 10y 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?

ptero 10y ago
The beauty is in the eye of the beholder (and I put IMOs liberally in my post). The OP mentioned GUI prototyping and I was viewing Tk in this context. For rapid prototyping, Tk is a better solution for me, by far. It is a very simple, script language that allows creating dynamic GUIs on the fly. I can make a simple GUI and hang calls on buttons and menus with a few lines of text. No compiling. No library mismatches to deal with. Whiteboard sketch to a working prototype often takes less than an hour, almost never more than a day. It is cross platform and text based, so we can email prototypes around for people to try it on their Windows, Linux and Mac machines, click on buttons and report what they want to change. It is text, and does not require installing software. This is a noticeable advantage in locked-down environments, where installing Tk once and running 10 scripts is much easier than installing 10 revs of software. Due to the language simplicity we had people who said they have no idea about it (and no plans to learn it -- they just wanted a prototype) making and sending back mods within a few days of getting the prototype. This is great -- then we know that this is what they want. Tk is long in the tooth and has many limitations, but for rapid GUI prototyping it is one of the most useful tools for me.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >It is a very simple, script language that allows creating dynamic GUIs on the fly. Very limited ones. And ones clients will have a shock when seeing. And still coding it all together. With Delphi you can drag and drop great looking (and more full featured) prototypes in zero time. It will be limited to Windows, though, I'll give you that.
  - ptero 10y ago
    Clients having a shock after seeing a prototype says a lot about the author and very little about the language the code was written in. Can you clarify "coding it all together" part. I have no idea what you meant.

klipt 10y ago

Microsoft poached some of the top Delphi designers for C#. As the saying goes, if you can't beat 'em...

vram22 10y ago
"That lead architect was:" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614808

vic20forever 10y 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.

atombender 10y ago
You're probably thinking of Object Windows Library (OWL) [1], a C++ library that was available to both Turbo Pascal for Windows and Borland C++, and which was briefly available for other platforms, including several Unix variants. Borland also had the older Turbo Vision toolkit, but that was for MS-DOS. OWL was designed a very similar class hiearchy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Windows_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Windows_Library
- jacmoe 10y ago
  Please search before jumping to conclusions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ObjectVision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ObjectVision :)

jacmoe 10y 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.

AstralStorm 10y ago
You could try Free Pascal related Lazarus instead. Netbeans Swing support also comes close.
- jacmoe 10y ago
  I have been following Lazarus / Free Pascal for years - and, as it turns out, started using it in earnest one week ago. It's great! :)

anthk 10y 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.