4 ms·

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. Mandat

by comboy 9y 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 9y ago
Borland management went wrong. 20 years...
flukus 9y 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 9y ago
yep. yep. yep.
marktangotango 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 9y ago
There's always Lazarus...
askvictor 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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

by comboy 9y ago

panzer_wyrm 9y ago

Borland management went wrong. 20 years...

flukus 9y 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 9y ago

yep. yep. yep.

marktangotango 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 9y ago

There's always Lazarus...

askvictor 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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