7 ms·

Other language built around IDE support: Delphi. The compiler was built with callbacks to provide code completion; it runs in process, as a DLL, as part of the

• comboy 10y ago
  Oh Delphi.. every time I fight with CSS and think about how easy making GUI apps used to be almost 20(sic!) years ago, I feel like something went wrong. Mandatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4
  • panzer_wyrm 10y ago
    Borland management went wrong. 20 years...
  • flukus 10y ago
    I had to do maintenance on an old winforms app recently, it's insane how simple it is to develop with, how quickly it starts up and how quickly it show users the data they want. I signed myself up as the project maintainer. And even that is an incredibly bloated technology compared to delphi.
  • jackmott 10y ago
    yep. yep. yep.
  • marktangotango 10y ago
    So did Delphi handle dynamically resizing and positioning layouts? My impression is all the old highly productive gui languages (Delphi, Visual Basic, ...) used absolute positioning. Personally I'd rather have a more complex gui framework (css, swing, wpf) that handles positioning than to be forever cursed tweaking pixel width, height, x, y values.
    • bitL 10y ago
      Yes, if you set anchors on each component you wanted to be resizable (more specifically, all four sides could have had an independent anchor).
      • flukus 10y ago
        Same with winforms. I'm not sure if it was added at some point or always there, if it was always there I wish I knew about it a lot sooner.
    • Joeri 10y ago
      It has anchor layout, flow layout, table layout, etc... I have typically found it easier to do the layout I wanted in delphi than CSS. The only annoying thing is that the visual designer has no undo, which you really miss when doing exploratory designs. CSS 2 really is terrible. There's a few things in CSS 3 that make it passable, but overall I consider it a failed layout system which needs more workarounds than it provides solutions.
    • JustSomeNobody 10y ago
      >... than to be forever cursed tweaking pixel width, height, x, y values. Inevitably, this is what CSS work devolves to, though.[0] [0] Pixel twiddling
  • bitL 10y ago
    There's always Lazarus...
  • askvictor 10y ago
    Haven't looked at Delphi since last century, but it seems it's still alive, and can produce iOS and Android (and all the desktops) programs. No idea how well though...
    • Double_a_92 10y ago
      It's rubbish. Worst IDE I've ever worked with, sometimes I consider just using Notepad. No day without crashes, random errors, intelliSense not working, debugger suddenly not showing variable values, code navigation not working... Embarcadero is just milking companies that need Delphi for legacy code.
  • sheeshkebab 10y ago
    I've been writing web apps for 20ish years, and also still can't see productivity catching up to what we were doing with Delphi and other desktop uis 25 years earlier... not even with react and all these other webpack/babel heavy things. Web development...
  • iamcurious 10y ago
    For those who want to see how Delphi GUI design is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRMo5JSA9rw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRMo5JSA9rw
• zem 10y ago
  and smalltalk is perhaps the ultimate example
• noir_lord 10y ago
  My all time favourite languages are (in descending order), Delphi, Turbo Pascal and C#. It's not a co-incidence that I moved to TypeScript recently and am absolutely loving it, it feels like JS but engineered.
  • twoquestions 10y ago
    Typescript is nice, I just wish it inferred types as well as F#.
• vram22 9y ago
  I've read somewhere (much earlier) that some of the early Borland products were written in assembly language. That's why they were so fast.