46 ms·

Why I Choose Delphi

• xupybd 9y ago
  Yeah but isn't there a risk of losing support? I work in perl a lot and find it's getting harder and harder to work with modern databases as the dbi driver slowly get bit rot. Is there nothing similar going on in Delphi?
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • dejv 9y ago
    Delphi is a one trick pony. You should use it for writing desktop apps and this area is not that dynamic anymore. For most databases there are bindings or you can use ODBC drivers, for networking there is good enough third party library. Rest of the things you need to code by yourself. There is not vibrant conmmunity anymore, but you might be able to find some answers in old mailing lists and such.
• epx 9y ago
  I liked Delphi a lot, as I liked Clipper a lot, but technology moved on.
  • heywire 9y ago
    Funny that you mentioned Clipper. It's a language that you don't hear about a lot anymore, but it was the first language I learned as a kid (my Dad built point of sale and inventory applications in it for local companies as side work), so it holds a special place in my heart.
    • vram22 9y ago
      Mine too. The fact that it had both dBASE-like functionality (was a superset, in fact) plus could generate EXEs was just a great combo. Like in other countries (I'm sure), plenty of small businesses in India relied (and some probably still do) on small custom Clipper apps (such as POS, inventory, etc.) created by small software consultancies or freelancers. You could tell it was written in Clipper by the typical color scheme and look of the form and by the status bar, when you were at such a shop to buy something. And the speed of data entry by the operators, in those apps (without any GUI clutter to slow things down), was phenomenal.
  • nurettin 9y ago
    I am glad a lot of people think like this. Less competition.
    • theGimp 9y ago
      Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      • coldtea 9y ago
        Who said he wouldn't say those things in a face-to-face conversation? And what's uncivil about them?
        • theGimp 9y ago
          What is the purpose of the parent comment? To score a point? To show us all the commenter is smarter than the vulgus? It passes the "gratuitous negativity" test to me. The same point could have been made without the condescension.
          • rodgerd 9y ago
            Yet you didn't feel the need to lecture the parent comment for s snide dismissal of a programming language and everyone who uses it.
          • coldtea 9y ago
            >What is the purpose of the parent comment? To score a point? To show us all the commenter is smarter than the vulgus? To defend their technology/language of choice, who they felt was undeservingly dismissed as obsolete? >The same point could have been made without the condescension. I think the "less competition" is a valid point. People that dismiss languages as "old" or not fashionable enough, often miss opportunities in niche areas -- case in point all the COBOL jobs.
          • 9y ago
  • int_19h 9y ago
    dBase-derived languages in general were a lot of fun. And incredibly productive, basically taylor-made for cranking out CRUD apps. I do ponder sometimes why we don't have something quite like that these days. Oh, people do try, but it's never that simple, and there are always a lot of moving bits with plenty of friction between them. The ease with which I could collect a bunch of data from a form and shove it into a record in a table somewhere in FoxPro is still unmatched (remember SCATTER/GATHER MEMVAR?).
    • MycroftJones 9y ago
      I don't, but I'd like to. Most of the online documentation on Foxpro is old, and doesn't convey the magic that I've seen happen with it. I'd love to see some combination of Delphi with Foxpro, probably with LISP syntax and Qt bindings. And a little bit of sugar from haskell and kona languages. What made Turbo Pascal great was the help system. For every single standard library function, it had a snippet of code that you could cut, paste, run, and tweak.
      • _mhr_ 9y ago
        I'd love to hear more about your thoughts on this. I couldn't find an email address in your profile, but I have an address in mine, so please shoot me an email.
      • mamcx 9y ago
        With the exception of the LISP syntax, I agree with you! I wanna get a relational / kdb+ / ml hybrid. ---- One of the gems of FoxPro was the always-on terminal. It have his own terminal/repl. In the IDE. Always ON. You can do CREATE FORM name and open the form as a table then do BROWSE and see how was made. And you could activa the terminal on a shipped app, so you can fix things on the fly. And the debugger (specially the var windows) was good. To date, no single debugger/var window have bees as good as was with Visual FoxPro.
      • int_19h 9y ago
        FoxPro also had a great help system, including context help with F1 for whatever was under the cursor. It wasn't quite as good as TP, because it didn't have true hyperlinked text - but it had a separate section in each article just for links ("See Also"), and it had very fast keyword search, so it was "good enough" in practice. And yes, also tons of examples!
  • coldtea 9y ago
    >I liked Delphi a lot, as I liked Clipper a lot, but technology moved on You'd be surprised. Technology might have moved beyond Clipper, but Delphi is even more modern than things in fashion today...
  • dguaraglia 9y ago
    I had a pretty good chuckle at this comment. I couldn't agree more. While I loved Delphi, VB, TurboPascal, ASIC and DJCPP back when they were in vogue, I feel like starting new projects in a decaying ecosystem is a bad idea. Soon enough you'll find stuff there aren't any libraries for, outdated database drivers, or hit a wall when trying to do something most modern runtimes make incredibly easy (something as simple as making an HTTPS request.) At that point you hit a diminishing ROI from using the language you love and it becomes a matter of productivity.
• taberiand 9y ago
  Does Delphi justify its cost? As far as I can tell, there are no free compilers - seems like a pretty high hurdle when most languages can be used for free.
  • tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    If you are doing commercial work the cost is easy to justify. My main concern would be whether you can continue to activate it if Embarcadero drops support or goes out of business.
    • vacri 9y ago
      You'll also have a smaller pool of candidates you can hire, no?
      • protomyth 9y ago
        If you hire by checklist then yes. Otherwise, I would expect any competent programmer to be able to grasp Delphi.
        • tylerflick 9y ago
          I was hired as a C# dev out of college. 6 months in, a legacy Delphi app was dropped in my lap for maintenance. It took me about a month to get up to speed, but after that it was just another platform/language.
        • Untit1ed 9y ago
          I wouldn't expect them to want to though. Not because it's a terrible language to program in, just because it's not going to look as good on a resume for later jobs.
          • protomyth 9y ago
            And that’s the sad part of HR departments hiring by checklist, we develop a monoculture which makes it harder to actually see different ways of solving problems or creates a reinventing the wheel syndrome. There are professions that value people with a range of experience. It is really too bad that software development often isn’t one of them.
• Animats 9y ago
  Free Pascal offers Delphi features.[1] Latest Delphi library release: Delphi 10.2 Tokyo (March 2017). [1] https://www.freepascal.org/ https://www.freepascal.org/
• kemonocode 9y ago
  Sadly, Embarcadero's chokehold on Delphi is what turned me off of it back then, and still does nowadays. You could argue FreePascal/Lazarus is an alternative, but it's really not the same.
  • mickronome 9y ago
    Agreed, I feel like the only real problem with Delphi was/is Embarcadero, at least for many years after Borland exited the picture. While one can argue about the pricing structure, the problem for me was that how they act and communicate never felt in any way professional, at least up until I left Delphi completely, it might have changed. Even today, more than a decade later, their website retains the same feeling of being built by the lowest bidder, seemingly without even hiring a translator/copy writer that has command of English. All of which feels super strange when you peddle a product for thousands of dollars. I have never seen anything better than Delphi and the VCL for building simple and easily deployed Windows apps, most everything fails on that second part. While it's a pity events took the turns they did, it's quite astonishing that MS and all their competitors never managed to find a way to easily and robustly deploy simple applications without the need for running an installer or using complicated runtimes.
• makerightmoney 9y ago
  delphi is good
• skrebbel 9y ago
  I'm very sad that Delphi is so inaccessible for hobbyists. In some spare hours I'm building a native app in Qt, but I'd have definitely built it with Delphi if I wouldn't have had to cough up 3000 dollars just to get started. In all frankness I don't get why Embarcadero doesn't copy Qt's licensing. If they make a free GPL version, Delphi-based open source could thrive while just about everybody who buys a license now would still be required to buy a license.
  • problems 9y ago
    If you're looking for something more Deplhi-like, why don't you just use .NET? Mostly open source now, tons of 3rd party libraries and component packages available for it, just like Delphi in its glory days.
    • skrebbel 9y ago
      Because I want a UI that works on Windows and macOS out of the box. Plus I want it to have a tiny memory/CPU footprint and while .NET/WPF is better than the average Electron app I still notice a difference.
      • problems 9y ago
        Definitely a good reason to use Qt, but you wouldn't get that with Delphi either. Qt is probably the best looking build-once, run with an acceptable UI package anywhere in that market. EDIT: Just saw your second addition... not so sure I'd agree though, the performance on startup of .NET applications these days is quite excellent and I haven't been able to tell for years, but I've been on SSDs with lots of RAM on recent chips I suppose.
        • int_19h 9y ago
          Delphi footprint is actually less than Qt in many cases (at least of older versions, don't know about the new ones). Don't forget that VCL wraps native widgets, so there's a lot less code in there.
      • 9y ago
• Cieplak 9y ago
  Since Delphi derives from Pascal, it seems appropriate to mention Project Oberon, an awesome OS project that Niklaus Wirth (creator of Pascal) worked on: http://www.projectoberon.com http://www.projectoberon.com If you want to borrow the book, I have a copy in my office in SoMa (2nd and Bryant).
  • badsectoracula 9y ago
    FWIW modern Free/Object Pascal is miles away from the principles of simplicity found in Oberon. For example in Oberon a string is basically a series of characters whereas in Free Pascal there is a refcounted copy-on-write string type that keeps the string encoding and does automatic conversion (e.g. UTF8 to UTF16 or UTF32 or native codepage where available) where needed.
• nurettin 9y ago
  Delphi 10.2 was advertised to support making Linux web services, so I decided to put it to test. I created a Windows Apache module, added a Linux 64bit target, added a data provider and a database connection. The idea is to provide the database as a soap service on Linux to get a quick and cheap(!) Data layer. The provider plays nicely with the client dataset and let's you interact with UI elements, sending automatic updates to the database through the soap service. So when I switched to the Linux build, I noticed that data provider component in the components toolbar was disabled. That means it isn't supported on Linux. Tricking the IDE with a Windows project, placing the provider in a data module and switching it to Linux target, I tried to get it to work on Apache. No response from soap. After a couple of hours of eyeballing and recompiling the provided Delphi sources, I realized that the support is actually there, but there were some programming errors such as not implementing the entire interface, and somehow the memory manager behaved weirdly on Linux, causing another interface to go nil while refcount still didn't reach zero. All in all, Delphi makes it easy to build Windows applications, complete with data layers and Model-view style. I just wish they would hurry up with the Linux server support.
• nice_byte 9y ago
  I cut my teeth on Visual Basic 6 and Delphi 7 back in the day, and always liked Delphi more for some reason...
• sien 9y ago
  Does anyone use the Open Source Lazarus IDE? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_(IDE) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_(IDE) It has Object Pascal and a RAD setup.
  • vram22 9y ago
    In this same thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14900486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14900486
• dmourati 9y ago
  Source for the Aristotle quote?
• Yuioup 9y ago
  Delphi is dead. Nothing to see here, move along.
  • christogreeff 9y ago
    Dead like COBOL?
    • peterburkimsher 9y ago
      Dead like Hypercard?
      • ribasushi 9y ago
        Dead like Perl?
      • tonyedgecombe 9y ago
        I'm really surprised Apple hasn't come up with something in this space, not everyone is a programmer but most people have things they could do with automating a little.
        • striking 9y ago
          See AppleScript and Automator.
          • tonyedgecombe 9y ago
            They aren't really Hypercard though are they.
        • candiodari 9y ago
          Apple is lead by the logistics expert of the old Apple and the CFO. Let's put it this way : they are less likely than before to produce new products.
• linopolus 9y ago
  Oh, memories from the past.. Delphi 2005 was my introduction to computers and programming, first in a course given by the local technical university, later in regular school. Wasn't embarcadero back then, but Borland I think. Neckhold either way. I liked how the development worked, and think it wasn't a bad environment to first learn programming. Anyway, that were years of fun, but I, as most, moved on..
  • tvelichkov 9y ago
    > it wasn't a bad environment to first learn programming. Actually I think it's great, AFAIK, Pascal is meant to be a teaching tool for students.
  • xchaotic 9y ago
    Same here, I think it's a very nice system to learn programming with (certainly nicer, more forgiving than c++) As time went by I moved on to PHP and other things. Is there anything that actually requires deep, low level OS hooks or anything like that, that would justify a desktop client app, as opposed to a browser based app, running locally (with web sockets and such?)
    • linopolus 9y ago
      > Is there anything that actually requires deep, low level OS hooks or anything like that, that would justify a desktop client app, as opposed to a browser based app, running locally (with web sockets and such?) Mh.. A great user experience? In line with other made-with-love apps, which fit in nicely into the OS?
• analognoise 9y ago
  I'm going to make the same comment that comes up every time I see Delphi and Lazarus/FreePascal: If you haven't tried Lazarus/FreePascal, you're missing out. It's really amazing, and it's truly free.
  • jeffdavis 9y ago
    Can you give a couple examples that you think are amazing?
    • int_19h 9y ago
      It's amazing if you're into Pascal. You don't really need anything else. But other languages advanced further these days. That aside, one thing that I like about FP is their text-mode IDE. They basically copied Borland's original Turbo Pascal (circa 7.0) IDE for DOS. Except this one runs on Linux etc. And, of course, has a lot more features. There's something about that TUI goodness that is hard to capture in modern GUI IDEs - and then it's also blazing fast (you think Sublime is fast? ha).
    • wila 9y ago
      It compiles to just about any platform you can come up with. You can build a GUI app for any platform and backend without having to change a lot of code. Builds to Linux, ARM/x86/x64, macOS, iOS, android, Windows, freeBSD and I'm sure I'm missing a few.
    • squarefoot 9y ago
      Here are some projects using it. http://wiki.freepascal.org/Projects_using_Lazarus http://wiki.freepascal.org/Projects_using_Lazarus It actualy surpassed Delphi in some ways. You can develop native programs on non x86 platforms. The IDE and compiler installs and runs fine on the Raspberry/Nano/Orange PI boards, and others, so if you want to write a GUI to view sensors and actuators status, or maybe a display for a homemade KSP controller, the tools are there already. Free both as in beer and speech.
  • JohnStrange 9y ago
    I currently consider using it instead of C++/Qt for a major desktop application, but I'm still undecided. Lack of good Emacs support is a major downside but the same is probably true for Qt (haven't checked yet). Still I feel that going with Qt is more future proof.
• tariandbari 9y ago
  I've not used Delphi/Pascal seriously for over a decade... and then a month ago, after being fed up with sublime/VScode/atom as my daily drivers for developing python I decided to write my own editor. So I installed Lazarus and within 12 hours I had a working editor which is so much FASTER than [put your JS based editor here]
  • nkantar 9y ago
    Is your editor available somewhere? Even just screenshots would be neat.
    • tariandbari 9y ago
      It is still for personal use, but I really hope that by the end of the summer I'll have something ready for public consumption
  • TimJYoung 9y ago
    This is the component-based nature of Delphi/Lazarus. You can find/buy components that implement entire chunks of your application in one shot, including code editors (SynEdit).
• eikenberry 9y ago
  > Finally, I really enjoy programming in Delphi. Sure it has it quirks, is a bit verbose, shows its age, etc. but there is something fundamentally elegant about this technology, it is always a pleasure to code in. I feel happy when I’m using Delphi. If a tool makes me happy, does the job, that’s win-win. People talk about the technology as if it can be objectively good or bad instead of a medium that you find a connection with. He likes it, that's the only reason for choosing it that really matters.
• nnq 9y ago
  Does anyone else have the impression the most of the advantages OP lauds Delphy/ObjectPascal for are also present in Go? ...is there any nice cross platform desktop UI system for golang? (with an actual user base... because these things have bugs that can only be find through extensive real world usage unfortunately...).
  • tariandbari 9y ago
    I worked with both OP (ObjectPascal) and Go, and Go really catches much of the spirit of OP. BUT Delphi is an IDE that was designed specially for making out most of ObjectPacasl (and ObjectPascal has extensions to interface back with the IDE) nothing in Go Ecosystem comes close to that
    • dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
      But if someone saw the opportunity and decided to fill in that niche, I'd be the first to spend my money on it. Make it cost $1000, it doesn't matter - a modern language plus and excellent IDE it's something really worth spending my money on.
      • MycroftJones 9y ago
        Let's talk. I've been thinking about building something like this for my own use; I think I'm not the only one.
      • TimJYoung 9y ago
        You're not going to be able to do it, at least not in the same way as Delphi. Go lacks the complete OO and component functionality that allows Delphi to provide its level of integration between the IDE and the code/components. It's not just a language that was popped into an IDE, rather the IDE and the language were created to work together as one, and it all revolves around proper class support/RTTI. Chuck Jazdzewski, one of the original developers that helped create Delphi, did a series of blog posts that details some of the thought processes behind Delphi: http://removingalldoubt.com/ http://removingalldoubt.com/ We sell a Delphi-like IDE for web applications (Elevate Web Builder) that uses Object Pascal, and the only other language we would even attempt to implement with the IDE/compiler is C#. It's the closest in terms of features/behaviors to Object Pascal, with the main difference being multi-cast event handlers (delegates) in C#, which is really just a compiler-syntactic-sugar detail.
• bruno2223 9y ago
  I still compile a old project in Delphi 7 once every 3 months just to add 5 lines of code, and they pay me monthly for it. It's cheaper than porting the whole system to any other language. It is a project that I've built 8 years ago. Delphi was already a "strange think" on that time, it was declining fast. I think Java killed Delphi - "One codebase for all platforms, even your freezer will have Java!" - this was the cool sentence on that time. Since I started with Delphi when I was 14 (I am now 33), a lot of thinks changed to me. Now I mainly work in back-end field, building APIs, Bots, Crawlers and Queues to do massive things (like receive million SMS per hour in a voting system for a TV Reality Show program) When I am programming, 70% of my time is Nodejs, 10% Python and 20% Vuejs. But I still miss the old days of drag-N-drop GUI of Delphi, really easy.
  • pjmlp 9y ago
    Which is one reason I am still sore about the whole VM thing instead of adopting AOT compilation from the get go.
  • jlebrech 9y ago
    there needs to be a delphi for react. I remember starting to learn components in delphi, never got round to it but I think you could composed them like with react and also style them.
    • pjmlp 9y ago
      We could have something like that if Web Components were actually a thing, but they are only properly supported on Chrome.
      • jlebrech 9y ago
        It's time we just make wasm render raster and vector graphics directly and throw the DOM away, i'm sick of it already.
        • pjmlp 9y ago
• ak39 9y ago
  Does Delphi's IDE allow undo/redo feature while developing forms based GUI apps?
  • jlawer 9y ago
    Yes
  • dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
    It's been built in for a long time.
  • ambicapter 9y ago
    Sure if you're okay with it being completely broken every once in a while.
• chadcmulligan 9y ago
  For all you folk talking about pascal and so on, Delphi really isn't about the language imho, it's about the components. The VCL is Delphi's component model, and it just isn't available anywhere else, if you've never used it, download the free starter edition and have a look. You can make applications in minutes, you can make your own components in Delphi as well and include them in the IDE, they look just the same as the ones that come with Delphi. You can also buy commercial components. You can make component editors that are included in the IDE to make things easier for developers, it is really unique.
  • int_19h 9y ago
    It was unique when it first showed up. But on e.g. .NET, you already had all the same stuff with WinForms back in 2002. Indeed, WinForms is so similar to VCL, even when it comes to the overall hierarchy (Object <- Component <- Control sound familiar?), you might look at it and wonder if Microsoft hired someone from Borland to work on .NET back in the day. Of course, it was only their chief architect. ~
    • chadcmulligan 9y ago
      Delphi still has an advantage over .net - no dependencies, you can ship a single exe without worrying about dll's, which makes it great for sme's
      • pjmlp 9y ago
        They are finally fixing it with .NET Native and CoreRT, but to enjoy them you need to target UWP or .NET Core apps.
      • nurettin 9y ago
        You can ship it as a single executable if you statically linked midaslib. Most data processing needs that.
        • e12e 9y ago
• omnibrain 9y ago
  The IDE is just so far behind the competition. Crashing all the time an slow. Theming support ist very limited (to date). Delphi Code Insight ("Intellisense") is slow and sometimes just refuses to work and is generally not on par with other offerings. Error Insight (the wiggly red lines thing) is even worse. Delphi still uses a single pass compiler which makes for great compilation speed but seriously limits the language constructs. The pricing is just out of this wolrd. You get the impression that they try to squeeze every last penny out of their existing user base. People always say one of the main advantages of Delphi is programming of database centric (CRUD) applications but compared to the SAP system it's still inferior. I think the principle of RAD itself may be flawed/dangerous. Sure, for small CRUD Apps with a single window operating directly with the db components (Grid, and those "mapped" Fields) you will quickly have results and it will work. But for larger Applications that all falls apart. The trouble I see for Delphi is that the whole eco system is rotten. In my perception there are only a hand full suppliers of components and libraries left. Some of those components are barely maintained and even worse documented. There is lots more knowledge and up-to-date examples available for C#.
  • pjmlp 9y ago
    Now imagine being used to Delphi and C++ Builder, trying to search for similar tooling on UNIX, back in the mid-90's. The only options available were a few 4GLs that cost more than even Delphi licenses are worth nowadays.
    • doozy 9y ago
      I learned to program using Borland Turbo C for DOS, but my first GUI applications were built with Delphi 2.0, which was the first 32-bit version. I earned my first money ever selling a shareware application I built with Delphi, before reaching puberty yet! The Windows platform was awful so I ran away to Unix, and trying to find something even close to Delphi was just impossible. The best thing we had was Tcl/Tk, which I used a fair bit. I tried Java at the time and remember saying to myself: You got to be kidding me. Eventually I gave up on GUI development for Unix and embraced the web browser is the UI philosophy and develop the back-end in Python (then a fairly new language). Best career move I ever made. I'm still fond of Delphi, it was a great product.
• interfixus 9y ago
  I did an awful of Delphi in the nineties, but the closed nature and the lack of portability failed to keep me interested in the long run. Lazarus/Free Pascal, for some reason, has never really managed to ignite any passion, and it's not because I haven't tried. Except for the lack of IDE/RAD, a worthy present successor is Nim. There really is no end to the potential of this clear, cool, concise, modern, fast, and elegant language.
  • bobd 9y ago
    I still make heavy use of Delphi - a superb tool for fat client apps, but I have to agree on Nim. The potential is enormous and I'll be using it increasingly in the future.
• mb_72 9y ago
  I love(d) Delphi, but commercial considerations - most significantly being the availability of alternative developers if I (as the sole developer for my customers) - mean I no longer start any new applications in Delphi and for two clients converted their applications to C# / .NET. The .NET ecosystem these days is an amazing thing in terms of development by MS / Xamarin, blogs, tutorials, SO replies, libraries; the Delphi ecosystem is tiny by comparison.
  • pjmlp 9y ago
    If only they would make .NET Native available outside UWP as well (CoreRT is still pretty much WIP). I have also settled on Java/.NET as my TP/Delphi replacements.
• Johnny_Brahms 9y ago
  As someone who maintains an unknown but very large(several MLOC) free Pascal code base, I must say that I can't see much reason in the Pascal hate. Sure, I would love to rewrite the whole thing in Lisp (which is the language that lets me keep my soul), but we are all in all still very happy with the current code base. A complete recompile is less than 20 minutes, and then about half that time is spent in guile for macro expansion (we have a macro DSL). We have considered porting it to chez scheme, but we rarely do full recompiles. Pascal lends itself well to big codebase, but will probably never again be a new cool thing. I do however believe that being able to test a big change on a Dev machine in less than 10s gives us a pretty big advantage over similar solutions in other languages.
  • tomcam 9y ago
    Impressive. What is the codebase?
    • Johnny_Brahms 9y ago
      Journal-system and everything what that means for medium-to-large health care providers.
  • pcblues 9y ago
    Yep. We had a 250k line codebase ten years ago that took 20secs for a full rebuild in Delphi. You could code like a demon. Even 17 years ago it had awesome reflection that let you do some really efficient (lines of code) stuff with generating classes on components.
  • flavio81 9y ago
    > Sure, I would love to rewrite the whole thing in Lisp (which is the language that lets me keep my soul) A kind salute to you, fellow Lisper!! However i've used Delphi in the past and found it a remarkably good language, i wouldn't think to port something from Delphi to Lisp.
    • Johnny_Brahms 9y ago
• jmnicolas 9y ago
  Why I don't choose Delphi : 4000€ licenses...
  • wulfklaue 9y ago
    So simply use the free "freepascal / lazarus". You wallet will thank you later. :)
• Mayzie 9y ago
  That library the author linked to target Linux, FMXLinux, costs $1500 to use. And that's the problem with Delphi: its ecosystem. They are anti-open, anti-share, and charge ridiculous sums of money - with questionable quality. There is nothing like Pythons pip, Rubys gems, or Rusts crates, with a plethora of free libraries. It has been that way since well before I started using Object Pascal.
• therealmarv 9y ago
  There was never anything wrong with Delphi as long as you staid in Windows land. And even there I would say C# (from the same main guy) destroyed Delphi because the interfaces to MS Office and DirectX etc. where much better and much more advanced. For legacy systems I would say Delphi is even today a good choice.
• skc 9y ago
  I last used Delphi at varsity. I was the only student in my class that chose it for my assignments and final year projects. That period was the happiest time of my life as a programmer even though relatively speaking I didn't know much. More than anything else, Delphi was just plain fun to use.
• Lerc 9y ago
  A number of years ago I wrote a remarkably similaly titled piece. Why I use (object) Pascal. http://screamingduck.com/Article.php?ArticleID=43&Show=ABCE http://screamingduck.com/Article.php?ArticleID=43&Show=ABCE But the truth is in the years since I have moved away and tend to use JavaScript or Haxe for a lot of my projects. I'm learning rust for Non Garbage collected projects. Until a couple of weeks ago anyway. I'm working on an emulator for an 8 bit Fantasy computer that uses an avr compatable instruction set. I recalled that there was a avr target available for freepascal and gave it a go. I had to build a trunk version of Freepascal with my own modifications to support my Emulator. It has almost no run-time library. It's just the language, and I really enjoyed using it. Coming back to Pascal after using so many other languagese in between provides an interesting perspective. You become more aware of the strengths and weaknesses. There are now a few things I would change If I were to make my ideal Pascal dialect.
• mihular 9y ago
  I really don't understand the "Components" chapter. XAML has both declarative approach and components. Besides if anybody is into Delphi, there is also RemObjects worth looking at.
• golergka 9y ago
  Last time I used Delphi was to build Knuth's Mix simulator in 2004, as a high school summer project. Me and my partner didn't even know about VCS system and used floppy disks to exchange code - and still, Delphi felt had this air of outdated technology around it. May be it was fascination with mighty and power C++ that so many beginner programmers have (before they learn to effective instead of smart). May be - because Pascal was the first language they tough as at school and it was much easier to understand than some Lisp dialect they introduced later on. But even then, the system felt so easy, so un-exciting... Which are exactly the feelings I search for today when I'm researching frameworks and languages.
• arjo1 9y ago
  I just tried using Lazarus, I found it quite fun to use. I understand where the author is coming for when it comes to RAD. It is extremely easy to use. It feels like C# but compiles down to native code that runs on all platforms.
• snarfy 9y ago
  Native Windows COM applications is one area Delphi was really good at. If that's what I was building I'd probably use Delphi. That was Delphi 7 though. I'm not sure where it's went since.
  • wila 9y ago
    The native Windows COM part is still good, you can create your own controls very fast and integrate it with other Windows programming languages easily. That part certainly has improved since Delphi 7.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• oceanswave 9y ago
  Wait, is this a recent article? If so, this is a really great attempt at humor: "My colleague told me to abandon Delphi, it’s obsolete, Silverlight is the future.”
  • striking 9y ago
    Yeah, it was written a few days ago
  • systems 9y ago
    Not at all, the article is recent, but this interaction with his colleagues is obviously old, and proves his point delphi outlasted silverlight honestly myself i was surprised by how easily and relatively fast microsoft abandoned silverlight, i really liked their rad tool, lightswitch , but it seems it was strongly coupled to silverlight, and got abandoned soon after it was announced that silverlight will not be further developed makes you think, you cant bet on a product, because it is supported by a large company
    • pjmlp 9y ago
      Silverlight, like XNA, were victims of the usual WinDev vs DevTools issues. Although that is a proper conclusion, the majority of successful programming languages always had a corporate sponsor driving their adoption and development, even the ANSI/ISO ones.
  • vintagedave 9y ago
    That's the point - something like Delphi stays, is reliable, is not deprecated, while relying on Microsoft tools ends up with tool and library turnover at a high rate. (Consider the past ten years of MS libraries...)
• sharken 9y ago
  Why I don't choose Delphi : No Garbage Collection
  • chadcmulligan 9y ago
    Why I choose Delphi : No Garbage Collection :-)
  • pjmlp 9y ago
    It has definitely partial garbage collection support, for some data types (COM based objects, strings, arrays).
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• Kiro 9y ago
  > Delphi is compiled to native code, so the performance is great. Without the overhead and inconsistencies introduced by a Virtual Machine (garbage collection, etc.) Why aren't all compiled languages compiled to native code?
  • jannes 9y ago
    Interoperability. Native code only runs on a single processor architecture: The one it was compiled for. Often you want your programs to run on multiple processor architectures without compiling binaries for all of them in advance.
• Spearchucker 9y ago
  Pascal is still my favourite language (being the 3rd I ever learned), and its syntax similarities with BASIC are why I prefer programming in VB.NET rather than C#. Curiosity's been piqued though, might just have a look at Delphi...
• phatbyte 9y ago
  I've always hated the Delphi ecosystem, awesome IDE, good-enough language, but everything else sucked, specially if you are a young programmer with limited money, you couldn't learn it unless you pirated it, even .NET had a free version. Everything there had a price-tag, from the IDE to the third-party libraries. So yeah, everyone moved on from Delphi, it's currently on palliative care, probably won't die any time soon, but it's becoming irrelevant as time goes by. If it wasn't for this post I wouldn't even remember it. We have much better technologies and IDE today. Good riddance Delphi.
  • jimbokun 9y ago
    Was a different business model from a different time, making money directly off of selling good developer tools. Even Apple and Microsoft charged for their development tools until relatively recently, I believe. Now open source and vendor tools have completely won that space, and its only possible to profit from developer tools indirectly. So not just Delphi, but the entire associated business model has become irrelevant.
    • rootlocus 9y ago
      JetBrains makes the best developer tools I've used, and while they offer free, community licenses, their more advanced tools still require a paid subscription.
    • phatbyte 9y ago
      It comes to my mind Unity (game engine), they have a very good business model. Their offer a free version to anyone willing to try, and premium tiers for more serious developers or companies.
  • wambotron 9y ago
    http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ has been around since 1999. Not like it's _that_ old, but for technology, it's pretty old.
    • badsectoracula 9y ago
• lasermike026 9y ago
  Why do people do this to themselves? You can't code in a vacuum. It's about community strength and modernity. If you don't have both you are wasting you time. It's like talking to a island cast away.
  • wambotron 9y ago
    What is about community strength? If he's creating applications and enjoys doing it, why does it matter who else is using the same language? Worst case scenario, he can translate libraries from other languages into Object Pascal, but realistically it has a decent-sized community. I don't see the modernity point, either. Object Pascal has modern features.
    • IshKebab 9y ago
      It matters because it affects how many third party libraries are available and the number of other people that can understand and work on your code. Object Pascal may have modern features, but that doesn't mean it is a modern language - nobody is going to start learning it now. Only people that have known it for years already will use it.
      • TimJYoung 9y ago
        Object Pascal is very similar to C# in many ways. It isn't like a developer that has used Java or C# would have a hard time learning and understanding how to use it. Re: modern languages: a language having modern features isn't a modern language, rather how popular it is at this moment is the most important aspect ? How did that work out for Python ? And where does PHP land using this criteria ? Is PHP better than Object Pascal because more people write PHP code ?
      • wambotron 9y ago
        It _is_ a modern language, and people do start learning it when they get jobs that use it. It's just syntax, and it's a really good tool for certain jobs. You should give it a go with Lazarus IDE and see if you still feel that way.
• NuSkooler 9y ago
  I used Delphi to create tons of both large apps and small utilities as a teenager. ...admittedly, I uh "creatively borrowed" the package then (couldn't even remotely afford it) and at the current price, I can see why people would continue to do that. With that said, I'd really like to check out Lazarus the next time I need to create such a GUI utility or the like. ...and if the price wasn't crazy, I'd be very tempted to try Delphi for some projects again.
• JohnTHaller 9y ago
  Fun Fact: The PortableApps.com Platform's menu is written in Delphi. We're debating whether to stay with it or not, mainly due to the buy-in costs for developers. We can either use no external bits and let people work with Delphi Starter Edition (free, only for use with free/open source, 32-bit only, no add-on support), convert to Lazarus (open source equivalent of much older Delphi version with many newer bits added), come up with the money to pay for a lot of licenses (unlikely), or rewrite in another language. It's a bit under 10k lines of code, so even a rewrite wouldn't be too painful. It's also worth noting that while the linked article mentions Windows 7 and up, the current version of Delphi 10.2 produces apps that also work under Windows XP and Vista as well.
  • oblio 9y ago
    Ghisler rewrote Total Commander with Lazarus. That's pretty solid backing, IMO.
  • vram22 9y ago
    I've tried out PortablApps some time earlier, but only briefly, and did not look into the infrastructure aspects. Are you saying that developers who create portable apps need to use Delphi in order to be part of your platform? And if so, why is that?
    • JohnTHaller 9y ago
      The main platform's menu is written in Delphi. The tools to package apps (both the AppNamePortable.exe launcher and the installer they are then packaged in) are written using NSIS. Developers packaging most apps can do so just by filling in INI files without writing a single line of code. The utilities include NSIS itself, auto-generate the code needed for the installers and launchers, and automatically compile them.
      • dom96 9y ago
        Have you evaluated any other languages apart from Pascal/Lazarus? If Windows XP+ support is the driving feature and you would consider a modern language then please take a look at Nim[1], it features some Delphi/Pascal-isms so you and your team may find it familiar. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have about it. 1 - https://nim-lang.org/ https://nim-lang.org/
• flavio81 9y ago
  I used Delphi for a project in 2004 or 2003 and i recall LOVING it. It "just worked". Nice times... Pascal itself is a nice elegant language, although a bit verbose.
• Fischgericht 9y ago
  We also use Object Pascal extensively. We do high-level stuff (Win32, Android, iOS) but also really hardcore low-level embedded stuff. We use - Delphi 7 - Delphi 10.2 - CrossKylix (http://crosskylix.untergrund.net http://crosskylix.untergrund.net) - CrossFPC (http://www.crossfpc.com http://www.crossfpc.com) And are able to compile native code to a gigantic amount of platforms, all from within a single IDE. Web stuff we also do, with ExtJS as a front-end. If anyone is looking for a hardcore Object Pascal job in Germany, let me know :)
  • i_don_t_know 9y ago
    I'm not looking for an ObjectPascal job (because I have zero experience with it and I'm quite happy in my current position). But I'm still curious about what you do. How do you build for iOS, for example? I thought you had to use Xcode. How do you convince clients that ObjectPascal is the right solution? That is, are client concerned that you're not using Java/ C#/ C++? I've always thought Germany was fairly conservative in this respect.
    • TomMarius 9y ago
      Most of the time, clients, and I mean directly the clients, don't even know what a programming language is.
• craigvn 9y ago
  As an old Delphi developer myself I probably agree that if you are writing desktop apps Delphi is hard to beat. But less and less people are writing desktop apps now, and most apps can be written as web apps which users prefer.
• l04m33 9y ago
  I can't believe there are so many people starting to use Pascal/Delphi around 14. I started at that age too. It was around 2002. I was told that a good way to start on computers was to attend in local IOI competitions, and that's what I did. During the competitions, our team chose Pascal for its clarity. The official IDE they gave us was Turbo Pascal, which was really a decent environment (though I hardly realized this until I tried out other dev tools later). The friendliness in Pascal/Delphi towards developers can really date back to those days, and is laying deep in the language's genes. Unfortunately, the previous "graphical" programs I wrote, before I got a hold on Pascal, was some simple Logo drawing dots and lines. And I had a terribly wrong impression that building GUIs are boring. So I skipped the chance of digging into the Delphi world, until I was in college. But then the Pascal/Delphi ecosystem was already decaying. I still feel bad for missing the golden era.
• jfoc 9y ago
  Because Delphi is great. I started to using Delphi on 1996. Starting with Delphi version 3. and Delphi 7 is most powerful version