19 ms·

Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

193 points by ch_123 7y ago

Nullabillity 7y ago
Next up: COBOL?
- walkingolof 7y ago
  There is nothing wrong Delphi, other than it's largely a niche language
  - vallode 7y ago
    But as educational tooling is that not a fault in itself? Surely we should be preparing students to at least use some mainstream languages, rather than pouring their skills and time into something that has a niche market value?
    - Leace 7y ago
      IMO this is a limited view on what students need to learn to be valuable on the market. Delphi teaches you the value of experimentation through small feedback loops. For novices that just start programming this is critically important.
      - vallode 7y ago
        Absolutely, I don't entirely know what would be the best thing for students. In the end students should be taught to disrupt the industries they join not propel mainstream practices. So there is something to teaching them with more niche languages, that help them think differently to what is currently on the market! Thanks for sharing.
    - rsynnott 7y ago
      I think there's actually an argument for teaching students in something that isn't widely used/usable, as this (a) gives them the fundamentals but (b) essentially forces them to learn other more useful languages on their own. As someone who had to use Eiffel, of all things, in college, I may be biased in this :)
  - Nullabillity 7y ago
    It's a commercial product. Why on earth would you teach the kids something that they won't be able to use afterwards, when there are plenty of alternatives without that constraint? It's like teaching kids to use Office, without even having the ubiquity argument.
    - walkingolof 7y ago
      It's about the logic, not so much about the syntax. And the office comparison is not valid, knowing Office is for many a very valuable skill.
      - Nullabillity 7y ago
        > It's about the logic, not so much about the syntax. So... Why Delphi then? And yes, many people do have a habit of sticking to exactly the environment that they were taught in. Defaults matter. > And the office comparison is not valid, knowing Office is for many a very valuable skill. As I mentioned in the other half of that paragraph, yes, you can make an argument for Office being valuable because of its ubiquity. But that's a circular argument. Office is ubiquitous because they managed to convince educators, and now that seems to have made it basically impossible to kill off. Trying to bootstrap something similar for Delphi is inexcusable.
trimboffle 7y ago
I have a soft spot for Delphi but this is odd. Delphi has seen its day. Any number of other languages can be taught for free... python is probably a more relevant choice.
- nurettin 7y ago
  Delphi is still very relevant when building desktop applications.
  - LeonidasXIV 7y ago
    Which is rather not where the world has been going towards in the last decade or so.
    - majidazimi 7y ago
      The number of small scale desktop applications (like restaurant accounting/billing or tax management) in Turkey or similar markets exceeds all forms of mobile/web apps combined. In my home town in Iran, C# desktop developer is the number one job offer for the last 10-15 years. The market is full of small businesses that need simple desktop apps to run the business.
      - kragen 7y ago
        Why would you want to build a restaurant accounting/billing app as a desktop app instead of a browser app?
        astura 7y ago
        Because that's what the jobs that are hiring are for in the place the GP lives? I mean, I'd rather browse HN than do work all day, but nobody's going to pay me for that. I was an early web developer who transitioned into a modern one as time passed but I've moved back to desktop application development as of late because that's what was hiring in my area at the time I was looking for a job and I simply am not married to a particular technology.
gaspoweredcat 7y ago
i have no idea why delphi still seems so popular in the middle east, a large number of mobile phone tools are still coded in delphi but ive never really understood why
- nottorp 7y ago
  Before everything came with an UI builder, there was only Visual Basic (before dot niet) and Delphi for building UIs quickly. But with VB you needed to switch to C++ for low level functionality, while with Delphi you could just do it in the same project. Including inline assembly. Those days are gone, but the legacy still remains. For this deal though, I guess Embarcadero is desperately looking for something that looks like a sale. All the cool kids in the west have switched to shit web UIs and they're probably left only with a few legacy customers. Edit: Yes, the deal is most likely bribery. Doesn't make Embarcadero less desperate. Their fault for going enterprise and pricing Delphi out of a hobbyist's reach. Edit 2: Sheesh, cheapest Delphi license is 1699 eur... back before Borland (sorry, Inprise) got sold i think it started at 300... Edit 3: It's still much cheaper than Qt at 5500/year. This is how great platforms die.
  - badsectoracula 7y ago
    > Sheesh, cheapest Delphi license is 1699 eur... back before Borland (sorry, Inprise) got sold i think it started at 300... The cheapest version actually started at $99 and that was up to Delphi 5 IIRC. Later versions bumped the price to $199 (and i think there was a $99 for non-commercial use) and then quickly ascended to thousands. I think it was after Delphi 5 that they also renamed themselves to Inprise.
- Canova 7y ago
  Delphi is definitely not popular in Turkey.. (that's why this purchase is odd.)
MrGilbert 7y ago
I had to giggle recently when I heard "Delphi is dead". It's not. And I don't think it ever will, because, both as a language and work environment, it is quite powerful. It has pretty low entry barriers, and is pretty capable. When I used it (as a hobbiest, during Delphi 5 and Delphi 7 times), it had a superb tooling, and a really efficient compiler. Everything "just worked". It's now 15 - 20 years ago, when we created really tiny Windows exe files. A notepad.exe clone in only 23kb size - with no external dependencies at all, just using pure Windows32 API and Delphi. These where truely fun times. Miss them some times.
- Leace 7y ago
  Totally agreed. I was fortunate enough to start real programming with Delphi 5 (and then 7). Nowadays I know dozens of languages and frameworks but nothing comes close to the experience of quickly prototyping apps that at the end looked good, didn't need any dependencies and were super-small. Another benefit was that it was possible to interoperate with low-level Win32 API and the enormous component library provided by third-party authors.
  - MrGilbert 7y ago
    > Another benefit was that it was possible to interoperate with low-level Win32 API and the enormous component library provided by third-party authors. Yes, absolutely. I'm happy to see that "Project JEDI" is still around[1]. [1]: https://github.com/project-jedi https://github.com/project-jedi
- throwaway8941 7y ago
  That's not how I remember it. An empty statically linked VCL GUI application used to weigh about 700 KB. Just as stupid edgy kids usually do, we were looking at other "C++ applications" a dozen KBs in size and were ranting about Delphi being so bloated and terrible. Of course, it was due to them being built on top of pure Win32 API, or being dynamically linked to a similar "bloated" runtime. It's not like we had an internet connection to learn from. At least that's how I learned the difference between static and dynamic linking.
h4l0 7y ago
I really don't want to sound cynical about this great initiative(!) but it saddens me that among many open modern languages and tools, they instead opted for Delphi. I cannot think of a single positive reason behind this decision in 2020. All I can think of is that the people that came to this conclusion are the ones who graduated from Computer Science related studies in ~1998-2004~ and immediately got themselves in politics. I lost count of how many times have I heard that if you pay for it, it's just better... Finally, I admit that I'm definitely highly biassed when it comes to Turkish Politics.
- Dolores12 7y ago
  All modern tools are really complicated compared to Delphi. I remember Delphi was so intuitive to design GUI and program its events so i could start making my own programs right after professor showed me how to make a button and handle onClick event.
  - p2detar 7y ago
    Well, in all fairness, the same can be said about Visual Basic and all the <inser name here> .NET languages. And I'm not even a Windows programmer.
    - barrkel 7y ago
      Delphi does however cross the stack better than VB - with inline assembler being available, and a pretty decent debugger with integrated disassembler.
  - badsectoracula 7y ago
    Lazarus is pretty much a free and open source Delphi (yes there are differences but they do not matter much) and really not any different in terms of difficulty compared to it. https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ You can see it in action under Linux here where i make a simple puzzle game: https://youtu.be/s_01Xhd2EJM?t=692 https://youtu.be/s_01Xhd2EJM?t=692 (if the time stamp doesn't work, skip to 11:32, the previous ~11 minutes are me downloading, compiling it and configuring it - not 100% necessary on Linux and on Windows i never do that as the installer is a classic wizard-based one, but as i write on the video, i prefer to compile it when using it on Linux - also note that on Windows you do not need to install FPC as it comes bundled with Lazarus, it is really just running the installer, double clicking the desktop icon and you're ready)
znt 7y ago
Python & Java and .Net has quite a bit of traction in Turkish software industry. I believe Delphi is mainly used in healthcare but has been losing market share for years. I think this is just another money embezzlement scheme by Turkish official, which shouldn't be that surprising unfortunately.
gdm85 7y ago
I see it as a valid learning tool, a modern alternative to a Basic variant, however later on I would complete the curriculum with something with a bigger market penetration.
spaceplane 7y ago
This has nothing to do with Delphi being education language. This is how you transfer tax money to your cronies.
- FpUser 7y ago
  And you were the bank teller who wired it right?
arghwhat 7y ago
This reminds me of a few (<10) years back when a high school student needed some C programming assistance. I then found out that they were being taught to use Borland Turbo C. I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its all they know.
- gdm85 7y ago
  Since the details of the deal are not public, I will give you another possible speculative scenario: bribery :P
  - Koshkin 7y ago
    But when the cause is just...
    - csunbird 7y ago
      ..use the correct tools.
- h4l0 7y ago
  and think that they actually didn't get a job at teaching programming but they involved in politics and appointed as "Minister of Technology" for their "loyalty" to the Head of State. That's what Turkey is dealing with right now. 5 or 6 years ago, our ex-minister, claimed that it is dangerous to work with computers since they can be challenging for the mind in a conference about cloud computing. Let that sink in.
  - rytis 7y ago
    Sounds similar to how cybernetics was "seen" in USSR (early years): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_Unio...
Koshkin 7y ago
Lucky Turkish students... If only someone adapted The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs for Pascal.
aortega 7y ago
Object Pascal is a great language, with many modern features and very optimized. Delphi add to this the best WYSIWYG ide ever created. But they could have used free pascal and save millions, though. This looks like your usual government corruption. At least this time they bought something useful.
taneq 7y ago
I was curious a little while ago whether Delphi or something similar was still available for modern computers (I think it followed from the same question about MS Access and VB6). Turns out there's a free Delphi-compatible IDE called Lazarus: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
- 0-_-0 7y ago
  Has anyone here used Lazarus? It looks great from its description but I'd be interested in an independent opinion.
  - oefrha 7y ago
    It was a pretty good IDE when I was using it slightly over a decade ago...
  - brnt 7y ago
    If you like Delphi, you'll like Lazarus. However, in my personal opinion, Pascal has not really kept up with the sort of creature comforts that nowadays even C++ affords the programmer. The IDE (Delphi or Lazarus) also don't provide the kind of help Eclipse gives you when using Java, even though Pascal may feel as verbose sometimes.
  - narag 7y ago
    Lazarus gives you rich, visual, native, multiplatform (OSX, Linux, Windows) GUI applications for free. I think also Android (and iOS?), but haven't checked.
  - canistel 7y ago
    I am currently using Lazarus for an open source project. I develop and test in Windows and Linux. Lazarus is feature rich and quite stable (barring a few minor exceptions). Package installation can be quirky, but you can live with that. The IDE is reasonably capable in code traversal and refactoring. If you are comfortable with Object Pascal and if you are targetting the desktop platform, definitely worth a go.
  - badsectoracula 7y ago
jacknews 7y ago
Is it a good teaching language? I admit ignorance, so this does make me want to find out more. I think more obvious options would be something like python for it's practicality, and something like clojure for elegance and more advanced programming concepts. And they're free. I hope this isn't a case of graft.
oefrha 7y ago
I too have a soft spot for Object Pascal but > Getting object-pascal back into universities and education is very important. Not just for Delphi as a product and Embarcadero as a company, but to ensure that the next generation of software developers are given a firm grasp on fundamental programming concepts; concepts that represent the building-blocks that all software rests on; a curriculum that has taken heavy damage from the adoption of Java and C# in the early 2K’s. doesn’t sound very convincing. Not a Java fan at all and never used C# since AFAIK it’s mostly used in the Microsoft ecosystem (I heard very good things about it though), but what fundamental concepts can’t be taught in a Java & C# curriculum that can be with Delphi? The article unfortunately doesn’t expand on that.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  Sounds like he doesn't want his students to get lost on OOP concepts.
  - badsectoracula 7y ago
    Delphi/VCL is heavily OOP though.
    - marcosdumay 7y ago
      Good point. Pascal isn't, but Delphi code is not exactly Pascal.
- blub 7y ago
  Java and C# are a morass of complexity. There is no job or project where you just use the language Java/C#, you have to pull their immense libraries and frameworks in too. On the other hand Delphi's just Delphi. That's quite refreshing in a world where everything depends on everything else.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    > There is no job or project where you just use the language Java/C#, you have to pull their immense libraries and frameworks in too. Why do you think this? I regularly write plain Java code, or code using just a couple of simple libraries.
yolobey 7y ago
Everyone is assuming incompetence/familiarity with old tooling but it's also likely that this is a corruption/kickback scheme with some local distributor
- marcocantu 7y ago
  To my knowledge, the software was provided for free, there was no economic transaction. In fact, Delphi Community Edition is free to any student over the world. This deal adds support for teachers.
egorfine 7y ago
What's wrong with dBase, FoxPro and Clipper for that matter?
- GrumpyNl 7y ago
  Clipper brings back memories, compiling took around 35 minutes, that was time to play some pool.
  - tluyben2 7y ago
    Really? The Nantucket one? I remember it, perhaps in error, as quite fast in compilation and I did write a couple of ERP systems in it back in the day.
- Koshkin 7y ago
  That these have nothing to do with anything?
revanx_ 7y ago
I programmed in Delphi for 8 years, then I switched to FreePascal. Yes, the grass is greener on the other side, and it's also free.
- non-entity 7y ago
  Going to start a project in in FreePascal soon because it seems to be the only [not abandonware] compiler for a high level language that still supports targeting 8086.
  - kragen 7y ago
    Huh, I'm surprised to find that you're right, unless you count NASM. Randall Hyde last updated HLA in 2015 (and it didn't support the 8086 anyway), WalterBright last updated DMC in 2013, and SDCC doesn't support the 8086. But I remember the 8086 as being a lot of needless effort that we had to cope with because it had a large installed base: near, far, and huge pointers, EMS bank switching, shitty TSRs that would stomp your registers, and so on. MS-DOS made it worse. What are you up to? Something like https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/ https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al... where the needless effort is the whole point?
    - non-entity 7y ago
      Yep, my goal is to write a kernel for an old IBM 5155 I picked up a while back. Mostly for fun
      - kragen 7y ago
        Are you familiar with Project Oberon and Liedtke's Eumel?
        non-entity 7y ago
        I'm superficially familiar with Project Oberon, but have not heard of the latter.
phendrenad2 7y ago
Professional programmers scoff at "old" languages like this, but they forget what it's like to not know the first thing about programming, or what GCC is, or how it's different from Clang, or if you need to install Linux to use it, or if you're making a huge mistake by using C++ instead of Rust, or if maybe Go is better, or why that one person said something about GraphQL, or if you need to install a virtual env for your python. Delphi just installs with a double-click and you can write code in a box and it runs.
- kragen 7y ago
  > Professional programmers scoff at "old" languages like this Old languages? Delphi is a lot newer than C. C in a mostly modern form dates from about 1977; Delphi is from 1995. If you want to just write code in a box and have it run, maybe you should use http://sketchpad.cc/ http://sketchpad.cc/ or https://jsfiddle.net/ https://jsfiddle.net/. Or code.labstack.com, intervue.io, codepad, codiva.io, paiza.io, compilr, ideone, onlinegdb, repl.it, rextester, mycompiler, jsbin, sequential, or the other couple dozen alternatives in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_source_code_playgrounds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_source_co.... Or ObservableHQ, which is fucking amazing. Or try.jupyter.org. Or just your browser's JavaScript console. Or ShaderToy, where you can program in GLSL. Or Philip Guo's http://PythonTutor.com/ http://PythonTutor.com/ which can step you through the execution of simple code step by step while visualizing the stack. And Python is five years older than Delphi, too. So it's not about disdain for old languages. Python was originally developed to be easily accessible for beginners, based on Guido's experience with ABC, which was purely a teaching language, and for some time Guido's main project was CP4E, Computer Programming for Everyone. It's moved away from that in the last 15 years or so, sadly, but some aspects of it still remain.
  - blub 7y ago
    Or you could use Delphi, install once, deploy on any platform you want, keep your sanity and you not have to worry about anything, including WTF codiva, sequential or leftpad.js are.
    - 7y ago
zwaps 7y ago
I mean, one may assume incompetence and corruption. And perhaps that's the case. But on the other hand, teaching languages are not the same as production languages. There are a number of languages that may be more powerful, but I think Delphi is a decent choice for teaching. * You want to teach principles. Delphi allows you to teach OOP principles. You may or may not agree that OOP should be the starting paradigm, but that is at least a popular and conventional opinion. * You don't want complexity. I am sure there are many alternatives that do things better. Heck, I am sure some Haskell guy will tell us itt how he can build a graphical interface in half a line of code. But remember these are kids who may not even understand what a program even is! * You want results. In particular, it should be easy to create things like a user interface via the IDE. The fun about learning programming is to create something cool. Kids today most often use UI's and not terminals, and I think there is real value to allowing them to create something they might actually use. If you struggle through understanding your first program, and all it does is to print out "Hello World" on a black interface, it is somewhat underwhelming. But if you can use the IDE to create your custom "hello world" box with pink borders and a unicorn picture - well that's cool! * Of course you want students to be able to transfer their skills to other languages. But that's arguably not a big issue with Pascal. * Finally, you want it all in one package. If you have to learn a vast module infrastructure, it just complicates things. Here is your "language", you can do everything in it. I remember when we were learning, we started to try to build games and stuff. We used the tools available to use, because it was all very complex and we understood little. It was useful to have such a limited toolbox in the view of complexity. I think if we were forced to think about modules and many, many options to do a thing, we'd probably give up. Of course it is educational to try to come up with a solution with a limited set of tools! From this perspective, Delphi is not a bad choice. Indeed I think the only other similar choice would be C#, which would probably cost more.
- jonathanstrange 7y ago
  I don't think the motivation is teaching-related at all. For teaching there are way better languages than Object Pascal, which is kind of outdated and has a lot of anachronisms. However, Delphi is an outstanding tool for production and together with Freepascal/Lazarus one of the best options for cross-platform application development - certainly on a par with C++/Qt. So this is a pretty smart move of Turkey to get some innovation going, and I expect great new end-user applications to come from Turkey during the next 10 years.
utf_8x 7y ago
This is just sad
ajuc 7y ago
I still think Object Pascal is a much better language for teaching than C, C++, or Java. It's simper, has fewer distracting features but covers all the important things, doesn't enforce too much boilerplate. Unfortunately it's undead since like 10 years.
anticodon 7y ago
Students will be taught a language they'll never ever use in real life. It was paid for although there're tons of free languages for every platform and every paradigm. I guess someone from the government had just become significantly richer.
- drbojingle 7y ago
  If the government bought into Delphi then dev jobs within the country will likely be in Delphi more and more as time goes on. They don't need to do what we're doing. There's more than one way to skin a cat.
- edagener 7y ago
  Nonsense
decafbad 7y ago
It's an introduction to computers and programming course, for everybody in technical and vocational high schools.
ulucs 7y ago
Corruption matters aside, I honestly think choosing a non-standard technology is a good move. Reading the news article, you see that the students mentioned are in trade schools. Turkey needs the trade school students to continue doing trades (there's a shortage of tradespeople), so it would make no sense flooding the javascript/c#/python developer market with trade schoolers now thinking they might make lots of more money despite not having any training on software development. We already have enough lemons in the developer market as it is. So if they learn Delphi, they can use some software automation to make their jobs easier, and they can easily learn another language if they turn out to be really good at this new thing. After learning an OOP language, learning a new one takes at most a week.
- blub 7y ago
  Honestly, they could maybe start a desktop app start-up. The web craze hasn't infected the entire planet (yet), and there's many small companies that require different tools and can't afford the big name packages or they can't find something matching their requirements.
  - netsharc 7y ago
    It's an interesting concept. Flood the market with Delphi programmers, then companies will accept Delphi solutions, and start asking for them too. But also the good programmers won't leave the country because outside of Turkey nobody is asking for Delphi.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
    Well, the web paradigm is definitely being pushed hard on naive users: https://covers.magazinecloner.com/covers/194392.jpg https://covers.magazinecloner.com/covers/194392.jpg
- vfclists 7y ago
  Where does the part about corruption come into it?
sitkack 7y ago
Idera (nee Borland) must be stoked, they potentially just created 1 million new Delphi programmers in a 2nd world country. I'd add a bullet point to the sheet. * One million Turkish kids This isn't necessarily corruption. And we have no idea what they paid. The internet is lousy in Turkey, having a stand alone system with documentation, an IDE and a great debugger will work really well in that environment. Pascal is a perfectly fine language. In my universe they started using Racket and The New Turing Omnibus (for middle school) and then The Little ____ Books [2] and then on to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs [3] [1] https://racket-lang.org/ https://racket-lang.org/ [2] http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/books.html http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/books.html [3] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html https://github.com/sarabander/sicp https://github.com/sarabander/sicp
- rolleiflex 7y ago
  > The internet is lousy in Turkey Um, what? I just signed up for fiber in Istanbul, lowest plan, 25mbit, at dirt cheap $11 a month — unmetered. Meanwhile my San Francisco apartment, Comcast charges me $67 a month for a 50mbit capped one. While there is some variance in availability (just like any other country) Turkish infrastructure is generally first-world. It is for political reasons that it gets demoted into the second, but ultimately we’re talking about a place with a $25k~ GDP PPP per person [1]. That’s more than Greece’s, and climbing towards Italy’s. [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/turkey/gdp-per-capita-ppp https://tradingeconomics.com/turkey/gdp-per-capita-ppp
  - maeln 7y ago
    I go to Turkey regularly and I always had a very good bandwidth on 4g, even in the middle of nowhere in Anatolia. The network is much, much better than here in France. I guess the geography of Turkey helps a lot there since they usually always have a good vantage point to put antenna. I don't know why people in this thread seem to think that Turkey is a poor developing country. It's not. Even with the recent political issues and the economical crisis, it is much better than a lot of country in Europe and in the EU.
timwaagh 7y ago
Pascal isn't necessarily the worst choice to learn programming in. After all, it was designed from the ground up for education and Delphi is one of the few environments around sporting a vb-style GUI creation interface. In high school, when i could barely program i still managed to utilize delphi to run some physics calculations. I suppose Java or C# makes more sense at the college level. But below that when the vast majority arent going to be programmers and the goal is to get them an idea of what programming is about i could think of few superior choices, if any.
Havoc 7y ago
You can do worse than Delphi for learning purposes. Would probably have picked something with a bit more job market potential though
FpUser 7y ago
I use C++/C, Delphi, JS, Python. Also Java, C#, PHP and bunch of other but on and off basis. Here is my opinion As a language Delphi/ObjectPascal is anything but ancient. It is kept up to date and has all the important features one would expect modern language to have sans garbage collection (well I actually consider this as advantage). It produces fast native executables without any dependencies. It compiles with such speed that one can write shell scripts in it. It has the right balance between a mountain of complex features C++ has and something like Go. Its IDE is nice as well and full featured. Both language and the IDE exist in paid version supported by commercial vendor and as an opensource project in case of Lazarus/FreePascal. Sure there are some problems but show me the language that does not have any, In my opinion the only REAL problems with the language/tools are all political. At some point these products were suffering from bad corporate governance and on top of that Microsoft went out of its way to actively destroy market for these in North America and along the way poached all leading developers from Borland including main language architect. To make a conclusion I think that ObjectPascal along with the implementation is a good candidate for being used in many areas as generic well thought out language along with the IDE. As for the article: I think it is a good move on Idera's side. To call it corruption is disingenuous I think. Many corporations are using the same tactic. It is friggin business.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > has all the important features one would expect modern language to have sans garbage collection No RAII or ownership tracking, no borrowck, no support for concurrency free of data races. Huge deal breaker.
  - badsectoracula 7y ago
    I know you are trolling, but just in case, you can implement RAII using record management operators: https://wiki.freepascal.org/management_operators https://wiki.freepascal.org/management_operators These are not in Free Pascal 3.0.6 (used in the latest Lazarus release) but they are in trunk and will be available in Free Pascal 3.2. I think they are also available in Delphi since a while now.
Zenst 7y ago
How many RPi's could they of brought instead. Heck, country that size and government backing at that scale could of thought - lets build a Turkish home made computer of rpi levels. Reading this I just can't feel like an opportunity missed.
vortico 7y ago
Turkey couldn't take over Delphi, Greece in 1920, so they take over Delphi, Embarcadero in 2020.
johtela 7y ago
Delphi is ancient - as am I. My first FOSS published in Internet was written Delphi in 1996: http://delphi.icm.edu.pl/authors/a0000824.htm http://delphi.icm.edu.pl/authors/a0000824.htm
akinbalcioglu 7y ago
This is not BUY. It is an agreement to supply the students within the curricula of 12 different courses for students to apply the projects using Delphi. It also covers an agreement t provide monthly scholarships to successful students.
zerkten 7y ago
In the UK during the nineties we had old versions of Delphi distributed on magazine covers. Magazines then carried numerous tutorials over the years that helped people get started on their programming careers when school computing courses had lost their way with a focus on IT. Computing in schools in the UK with the BBC Micro had been much more useful as a basis for learning programming, something Eben Upton called out in his Raspberry PI keynote at PyCon a number of years ago. I recall discussions with other students in my first year of uni about how they learned to program real things for family and businesses with these tools. Native and efficient Win16 and later Win32 (compared to VB runtime) programs were an exciting proposition in the 90s. Delphi could be used to create things that weren't as viable with VB. Personally, I chose C++ Builder for some reason (probably because I had heard about the industry use of C++), but even it had interesting facets, like the VCL compatibility with the Delphi toolset.
- tomjen3 7y ago
  That was exactly how I got my start as a programmer, except in Denmark. It is so hard to understand that today you can download Python, Ruby, Java or anything else you want for nothing, but back then those where a Big Deal.
deleted 7y ago
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looper_dude 7y ago
Honest question: if the goal is to teach true OOP, why not teach Smalltalk?
Aperocky 7y ago
What a waste. Studying software programming does not start with buying licenses.
turkthrower123 7y ago
I wonder how much Delphi/Idera bribed the head of the Ministry of Industry and Technology for this boondoggle. Allahallah, and they wonder why 10% of our country is illiterate. Every single decision by the government is made from the perspective of "how can I make a lira off of this" MIIT chief Faruk Özlü just bought himself a new mansion in Mugla over the summer. Just saying.
- dang 7y ago
  We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. Political flamewar is off topic here, regardless of how right and/or righteous your cause is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
kdtop 7y ago
Eternal truths: * New things are typically more popular than older things. * People not using ObjectPascal / Delphi love to hate on it. * People using it feel outraged at the injustice, pointing out it's merits. I have been using Delphi for about 30 yrs it seems. I have a love / hate relationship with it. Love the language and the ability to rapidly get the program I want created. Hate that version after version, the IDE STILL has stupid bugs; that the built-in help seems to get worse and worse with time (I don't want a slow web browser showing me Microsoft C calls and all sorts of irrelevant nonsense), and get very annoyed when having to get required custom components installed before being able to open a project using the components. And I REALLY dislike that they charge so bloody much for it. For business reasons I had to purchase a license that cost a few thousand dollars. Like 2 weeks later, sales people were calling me encouraging me to spend a similar amount to upgrade to the newest version that had just come out. They must have only a handful of paying customers and depend on the few to keep their entire business afloat.
rafaelvasco 7y ago
Started programming 14 years ago with Turbo Pascal. It was amazing. Good days. I remember having so much fun coding a command line application, full of blinking colors, colored text and stuff. Always have been a graphics inclined programmer.
jhoechtl 7y ago
They should have gone with Go. It's also Wirthian in spirit and is likely to get you a job.
deleted 7y ago
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gabrielbauman 7y ago
I wonder why they didn't just use Lazarus. Open source Delphi. https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
zelly 7y ago
Smart. While everyone is trampling over each other to get into the tiny little door (the SaaS/FAANG/npm/golang/frontend/iOS scene), they found the smaller side door that no one else is taking. Delphi is good for ordinary line-of-business software, all the boring back office software that people take for granted in first world countries.
deleted 7y ago
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fiatjaf 7y ago
I expected to see people complaining that a government spend tons of money buying licenses when there are hundreds of other languages that you can use for free out there, but instead I saw people saying Delphi is good, Delphi is bad, Pascal whatever.
kovach 7y ago
Mods please change the title to remove "buys", the article changed it's title to "Turkish ministry of education secures free access to Delphi for an estimated one million students".

193 points by ch_123 7y ago

Nullabillity 7y ago

Next up: COBOL?

walkingolof 7y ago
There is nothing wrong Delphi, other than it's largely a niche language
- vallode 7y ago
  But as educational tooling is that not a fault in itself? Surely we should be preparing students to at least use some mainstream languages, rather than pouring their skills and time into something that has a niche market value?
  - Leace 7y ago
    IMO this is a limited view on what students need to learn to be valuable on the market. Delphi teaches you the value of experimentation through small feedback loops. For novices that just start programming this is critically important.
    - vallode 7y ago
      Absolutely, I don't entirely know what would be the best thing for students. In the end students should be taught to disrupt the industries they join not propel mainstream practices. So there is something to teaching them with more niche languages, that help them think differently to what is currently on the market! Thanks for sharing.
  - rsynnott 7y ago
    I think there's actually an argument for teaching students in something that isn't widely used/usable, as this (a) gives them the fundamentals but (b) essentially forces them to learn other more useful languages on their own. As someone who had to use Eiffel, of all things, in college, I may be biased in this :)
- Nullabillity 7y ago
  It's a commercial product. Why on earth would you teach the kids something that they won't be able to use afterwards, when there are plenty of alternatives without that constraint? It's like teaching kids to use Office, without even having the ubiquity argument.
  - walkingolof 7y ago
    It's about the logic, not so much about the syntax. And the office comparison is not valid, knowing Office is for many a very valuable skill.
    - Nullabillity 7y ago
      > It's about the logic, not so much about the syntax. So... Why Delphi then? And yes, many people do have a habit of sticking to exactly the environment that they were taught in. Defaults matter. > And the office comparison is not valid, knowing Office is for many a very valuable skill. As I mentioned in the other half of that paragraph, yes, you can make an argument for Office being valuable because of its ubiquity. But that's a circular argument. Office is ubiquitous because they managed to convince educators, and now that seems to have made it basically impossible to kill off. Trying to bootstrap something similar for Delphi is inexcusable.

trimboffle 7y ago

I have a soft spot for Delphi but this is odd. Delphi has seen its day. Any number of other languages can be taught for free... python is probably a more relevant choice.

nurettin 7y ago
Delphi is still very relevant when building desktop applications.
- LeonidasXIV 7y ago
  Which is rather not where the world has been going towards in the last decade or so.
  - majidazimi 7y ago
    The number of small scale desktop applications (like restaurant accounting/billing or tax management) in Turkey or similar markets exceeds all forms of mobile/web apps combined. In my home town in Iran, C# desktop developer is the number one job offer for the last 10-15 years. The market is full of small businesses that need simple desktop apps to run the business.
    - kragen 7y ago
      Why would you want to build a restaurant accounting/billing app as a desktop app instead of a browser app?
      - astura 7y ago
        Because that's what the jobs that are hiring are for in the place the GP lives? I mean, I'd rather browse HN than do work all day, but nobody's going to pay me for that. I was an early web developer who transitioned into a modern one as time passed but I've moved back to desktop application development as of late because that's what was hiring in my area at the time I was looking for a job and I simply am not married to a particular technology.

gaspoweredcat 7y ago

i have no idea why delphi still seems so popular in the middle east, a large number of mobile phone tools are still coded in delphi but ive never really understood why

nottorp 7y ago
Before everything came with an UI builder, there was only Visual Basic (before dot niet) and Delphi for building UIs quickly. But with VB you needed to switch to C++ for low level functionality, while with Delphi you could just do it in the same project. Including inline assembly. Those days are gone, but the legacy still remains. For this deal though, I guess Embarcadero is desperately looking for something that looks like a sale. All the cool kids in the west have switched to shit web UIs and they're probably left only with a few legacy customers. Edit: Yes, the deal is most likely bribery. Doesn't make Embarcadero less desperate. Their fault for going enterprise and pricing Delphi out of a hobbyist's reach. Edit 2: Sheesh, cheapest Delphi license is 1699 eur... back before Borland (sorry, Inprise) got sold i think it started at 300... Edit 3: It's still much cheaper than Qt at 5500/year. This is how great platforms die.
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  > Sheesh, cheapest Delphi license is 1699 eur... back before Borland (sorry, Inprise) got sold i think it started at 300... The cheapest version actually started at $99 and that was up to Delphi 5 IIRC. Later versions bumped the price to $199 (and i think there was a $99 for non-commercial use) and then quickly ascended to thousands. I think it was after Delphi 5 that they also renamed themselves to Inprise.
Canova 7y ago
Delphi is definitely not popular in Turkey.. (that's why this purchase is odd.)

MrGilbert 7y ago

I had to giggle recently when I heard "Delphi is dead". It's not. And I don't think it ever will, because, both as a language and work environment, it is quite powerful. It has pretty low entry barriers, and is pretty capable. When I used it (as a hobbiest, during Delphi 5 and Delphi 7 times), it had a superb tooling, and a really efficient compiler. Everything "just worked". It's now 15 - 20 years ago, when we created really tiny Windows exe files. A notepad.exe clone in only 23kb size - with no external dependencies at all, just using pure Windows32 API and Delphi. These where truely fun times. Miss them some times.

Leace 7y ago
Totally agreed. I was fortunate enough to start real programming with Delphi 5 (and then 7). Nowadays I know dozens of languages and frameworks but nothing comes close to the experience of quickly prototyping apps that at the end looked good, didn't need any dependencies and were super-small. Another benefit was that it was possible to interoperate with low-level Win32 API and the enormous component library provided by third-party authors.
- MrGilbert 7y ago
  > Another benefit was that it was possible to interoperate with low-level Win32 API and the enormous component library provided by third-party authors. Yes, absolutely. I'm happy to see that "Project JEDI" is still around[1]. [1]: https://github.com/project-jedi https://github.com/project-jedi
throwaway8941 7y ago
That's not how I remember it. An empty statically linked VCL GUI application used to weigh about 700 KB. Just as stupid edgy kids usually do, we were looking at other "C++ applications" a dozen KBs in size and were ranting about Delphi being so bloated and terrible. Of course, it was due to them being built on top of pure Win32 API, or being dynamically linked to a similar "bloated" runtime. It's not like we had an internet connection to learn from. At least that's how I learned the difference between static and dynamic linking.

h4l0 7y ago

I really don't want to sound cynical about this great initiative(!) but it saddens me that among many open modern languages and tools, they instead opted for Delphi. I cannot think of a single positive reason behind this decision in 2020. All I can think of is that the people that came to this conclusion are the ones who graduated from Computer Science related studies in ~1998-2004~ and immediately got themselves in politics. I lost count of how many times have I heard that if you pay for it, it's just better... Finally, I admit that I'm definitely highly biassed when it comes to Turkish Politics.

Dolores12 7y ago
All modern tools are really complicated compared to Delphi. I remember Delphi was so intuitive to design GUI and program its events so i could start making my own programs right after professor showed me how to make a button and handle onClick event.
- p2detar 7y ago
  Well, in all fairness, the same can be said about Visual Basic and all the <inser name here> .NET languages. And I'm not even a Windows programmer.
  - barrkel 7y ago
    Delphi does however cross the stack better than VB - with inline assembler being available, and a pretty decent debugger with integrated disassembler.
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  Lazarus is pretty much a free and open source Delphi (yes there are differences but they do not matter much) and really not any different in terms of difficulty compared to it. https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ You can see it in action under Linux here where i make a simple puzzle game: https://youtu.be/s_01Xhd2EJM?t=692 https://youtu.be/s_01Xhd2EJM?t=692 (if the time stamp doesn't work, skip to 11:32, the previous ~11 minutes are me downloading, compiling it and configuring it - not 100% necessary on Linux and on Windows i never do that as the installer is a classic wizard-based one, but as i write on the video, i prefer to compile it when using it on Linux - also note that on Windows you do not need to install FPC as it comes bundled with Lazarus, it is really just running the installer, double clicking the desktop icon and you're ready)

znt 7y ago

Python & Java and .Net has quite a bit of traction in Turkish software industry. I believe Delphi is mainly used in healthcare but has been losing market share for years. I think this is just another money embezzlement scheme by Turkish official, which shouldn't be that surprising unfortunately.

gdm85 7y ago

I see it as a valid learning tool, a modern alternative to a Basic variant, however later on I would complete the curriculum with something with a bigger market penetration.

spaceplane 7y ago

This has nothing to do with Delphi being education language. This is how you transfer tax money to your cronies.

FpUser 7y ago
And you were the bank teller who wired it right?

arghwhat 7y ago

This reminds me of a few (<10) years back when a high school student needed some C programming assistance. I then found out that they were being taught to use Borland Turbo C. I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its all they know.

gdm85 7y ago
Since the details of the deal are not public, I will give you another possible speculative scenario: bribery :P
- Koshkin 7y ago
  But when the cause is just...
  - csunbird 7y ago
    ..use the correct tools.
h4l0 7y ago
and think that they actually didn't get a job at teaching programming but they involved in politics and appointed as "Minister of Technology" for their "loyalty" to the Head of State. That's what Turkey is dealing with right now. 5 or 6 years ago, our ex-minister, claimed that it is dangerous to work with computers since they can be challenging for the mind in a conference about cloud computing. Let that sink in.
- rytis 7y ago
  Sounds similar to how cybernetics was "seen" in USSR (early years): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_Unio...

Koshkin 7y ago

Lucky Turkish students... If only someone adapted The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs for Pascal.

aortega 7y ago

Object Pascal is a great language, with many modern features and very optimized. Delphi add to this the best WYSIWYG ide ever created. But they could have used free pascal and save millions, though. This looks like your usual government corruption. At least this time they bought something useful.

taneq 7y ago

I was curious a little while ago whether Delphi or something similar was still available for modern computers (I think it followed from the same question about MS Access and VB6). Turns out there's a free Delphi-compatible IDE called Lazarus: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

0-_-0 7y ago
Has anyone here used Lazarus? It looks great from its description but I'd be interested in an independent opinion.
- oefrha 7y ago
  It was a pretty good IDE when I was using it slightly over a decade ago...
- brnt 7y ago
  If you like Delphi, you'll like Lazarus. However, in my personal opinion, Pascal has not really kept up with the sort of creature comforts that nowadays even C++ affords the programmer. The IDE (Delphi or Lazarus) also don't provide the kind of help Eclipse gives you when using Java, even though Pascal may feel as verbose sometimes.
- narag 7y ago
  Lazarus gives you rich, visual, native, multiplatform (OSX, Linux, Windows) GUI applications for free. I think also Android (and iOS?), but haven't checked.
- canistel 7y ago
  I am currently using Lazarus for an open source project. I develop and test in Windows and Linux. Lazarus is feature rich and quite stable (barring a few minor exceptions). Package installation can be quirky, but you can live with that. The IDE is reasonably capable in code traversal and refactoring. If you are comfortable with Object Pascal and if you are targetting the desktop platform, definitely worth a go.
- badsectoracula 7y ago

jacknews 7y ago

Is it a good teaching language? I admit ignorance, so this does make me want to find out more. I think more obvious options would be something like python for it's practicality, and something like clojure for elegance and more advanced programming concepts. And they're free. I hope this isn't a case of graft.

oefrha 7y ago

I too have a soft spot for Object Pascal but > Getting object-pascal back into universities and education is very important. Not just for Delphi as a product and Embarcadero as a company, but to ensure that the next generation of software developers are given a firm grasp on fundamental programming concepts; concepts that represent the building-blocks that all software rests on; a curriculum that has taken heavy damage from the adoption of Java and C# in the early 2K’s. doesn’t sound very convincing. Not a Java fan at all and never used C# since AFAIK it’s mostly used in the Microsoft ecosystem (I heard very good things about it though), but what fundamental concepts can’t be taught in a Java & C# curriculum that can be with Delphi? The article unfortunately doesn’t expand on that.

marcosdumay 7y ago
Sounds like he doesn't want his students to get lost on OOP concepts.
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  Delphi/VCL is heavily OOP though.
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    Good point. Pascal isn't, but Delphi code is not exactly Pascal.
blub 7y ago
Java and C# are a morass of complexity. There is no job or project where you just use the language Java/C#, you have to pull their immense libraries and frameworks in too. On the other hand Delphi's just Delphi. That's quite refreshing in a world where everything depends on everything else.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > There is no job or project where you just use the language Java/C#, you have to pull their immense libraries and frameworks in too. Why do you think this? I regularly write plain Java code, or code using just a couple of simple libraries.

yolobey 7y ago

Everyone is assuming incompetence/familiarity with old tooling but it's also likely that this is a corruption/kickback scheme with some local distributor

marcocantu 7y ago
To my knowledge, the software was provided for free, there was no economic transaction. In fact, Delphi Community Edition is free to any student over the world. This deal adds support for teachers.

egorfine 7y ago

What's wrong with dBase, FoxPro and Clipper for that matter?

GrumpyNl 7y ago
Clipper brings back memories, compiling took around 35 minutes, that was time to play some pool.
- tluyben2 7y ago
  Really? The Nantucket one? I remember it, perhaps in error, as quite fast in compilation and I did write a couple of ERP systems in it back in the day.
Koshkin 7y ago
That these have nothing to do with anything?

revanx_ 7y ago

I programmed in Delphi for 8 years, then I switched to FreePascal. Yes, the grass is greener on the other side, and it's also free.

non-entity 7y ago
Going to start a project in in FreePascal soon because it seems to be the only [not abandonware] compiler for a high level language that still supports targeting 8086.
- kragen 7y ago
  Huh, I'm surprised to find that you're right, unless you count NASM. Randall Hyde last updated HLA in 2015 (and it didn't support the 8086 anyway), WalterBright last updated DMC in 2013, and SDCC doesn't support the 8086. But I remember the 8086 as being a lot of needless effort that we had to cope with because it had a large installed base: near, far, and huge pointers, EMS bank switching, shitty TSRs that would stomp your registers, and so on. MS-DOS made it worse. What are you up to? Something like https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/ https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al... where the needless effort is the whole point?
  - non-entity 7y ago
    Yep, my goal is to write a kernel for an old IBM 5155 I picked up a while back. Mostly for fun
    - kragen 7y ago
      Are you familiar with Project Oberon and Liedtke's Eumel?
      - non-entity 7y ago
        I'm superficially familiar with Project Oberon, but have not heard of the latter.

phendrenad2 7y ago

Professional programmers scoff at "old" languages like this, but they forget what it's like to not know the first thing about programming, or what GCC is, or how it's different from Clang, or if you need to install Linux to use it, or if you're making a huge mistake by using C++ instead of Rust, or if maybe Go is better, or why that one person said something about GraphQL, or if you need to install a virtual env for your python. Delphi just installs with a double-click and you can write code in a box and it runs.

kragen 7y ago
> Professional programmers scoff at "old" languages like this Old languages? Delphi is a lot newer than C. C in a mostly modern form dates from about 1977; Delphi is from 1995. If you want to just write code in a box and have it run, maybe you should use http://sketchpad.cc/ http://sketchpad.cc/ or https://jsfiddle.net/ https://jsfiddle.net/. Or code.labstack.com, intervue.io, codepad, codiva.io, paiza.io, compilr, ideone, onlinegdb, repl.it, rextester, mycompiler, jsbin, sequential, or the other couple dozen alternatives in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_source_code_playgrounds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_source_co.... Or ObservableHQ, which is fucking amazing. Or try.jupyter.org. Or just your browser's JavaScript console. Or ShaderToy, where you can program in GLSL. Or Philip Guo's http://PythonTutor.com/ http://PythonTutor.com/ which can step you through the execution of simple code step by step while visualizing the stack. And Python is five years older than Delphi, too. So it's not about disdain for old languages. Python was originally developed to be easily accessible for beginners, based on Guido's experience with ABC, which was purely a teaching language, and for some time Guido's main project was CP4E, Computer Programming for Everyone. It's moved away from that in the last 15 years or so, sadly, but some aspects of it still remain.
- blub 7y ago
  Or you could use Delphi, install once, deploy on any platform you want, keep your sanity and you not have to worry about anything, including WTF codiva, sequential or leftpad.js are.
  - 7y ago

zwaps 7y ago

I mean, one may assume incompetence and corruption. And perhaps that's the case. But on the other hand, teaching languages are not the same as production languages. There are a number of languages that may be more powerful, but I think Delphi is a decent choice for teaching. * You want to teach principles. Delphi allows you to teach OOP principles. You may or may not agree that OOP should be the starting paradigm, but that is at least a popular and conventional opinion. * You don't want complexity. I am sure there are many alternatives that do things better. Heck, I am sure some Haskell guy will tell us itt how he can build a graphical interface in half a line of code. But remember these are kids who may not even understand what a program even is! * You want results. In particular, it should be easy to create things like a user interface via the IDE. The fun about learning programming is to create something cool. Kids today most often use UI's and not terminals, and I think there is real value to allowing them to create something they might actually use. If you struggle through understanding your first program, and all it does is to print out "Hello World" on a black interface, it is somewhat underwhelming. But if you can use the IDE to create your custom "hello world" box with pink borders and a unicorn picture - well that's cool! * Of course you want students to be able to transfer their skills to other languages. But that's arguably not a big issue with Pascal. * Finally, you want it all in one package. If you have to learn a vast module infrastructure, it just complicates things. Here is your "language", you can do everything in it. I remember when we were learning, we started to try to build games and stuff. We used the tools available to use, because it was all very complex and we understood little. It was useful to have such a limited toolbox in the view of complexity. I think if we were forced to think about modules and many, many options to do a thing, we'd probably give up. Of course it is educational to try to come up with a solution with a limited set of tools! From this perspective, Delphi is not a bad choice. Indeed I think the only other similar choice would be C#, which would probably cost more.

jonathanstrange 7y ago
I don't think the motivation is teaching-related at all. For teaching there are way better languages than Object Pascal, which is kind of outdated and has a lot of anachronisms. However, Delphi is an outstanding tool for production and together with Freepascal/Lazarus one of the best options for cross-platform application development - certainly on a par with C++/Qt. So this is a pretty smart move of Turkey to get some innovation going, and I expect great new end-user applications to come from Turkey during the next 10 years.

utf_8x 7y ago

This is just sad

ajuc 7y ago

I still think Object Pascal is a much better language for teaching than C, C++, or Java. It's simper, has fewer distracting features but covers all the important things, doesn't enforce too much boilerplate. Unfortunately it's undead since like 10 years.

anticodon 7y ago

Students will be taught a language they'll never ever use in real life. It was paid for although there're tons of free languages for every platform and every paradigm. I guess someone from the government had just become significantly richer.

drbojingle 7y ago
If the government bought into Delphi then dev jobs within the country will likely be in Delphi more and more as time goes on. They don't need to do what we're doing. There's more than one way to skin a cat.
edagener 7y ago
Nonsense

decafbad 7y ago

It's an introduction to computers and programming course, for everybody in technical and vocational high schools.

ulucs 7y ago

Corruption matters aside, I honestly think choosing a non-standard technology is a good move. Reading the news article, you see that the students mentioned are in trade schools. Turkey needs the trade school students to continue doing trades (there's a shortage of tradespeople), so it would make no sense flooding the javascript/c#/python developer market with trade schoolers now thinking they might make lots of more money despite not having any training on software development. We already have enough lemons in the developer market as it is. So if they learn Delphi, they can use some software automation to make their jobs easier, and they can easily learn another language if they turn out to be really good at this new thing. After learning an OOP language, learning a new one takes at most a week.

blub 7y ago
Honestly, they could maybe start a desktop app start-up. The web craze hasn't infected the entire planet (yet), and there's many small companies that require different tools and can't afford the big name packages or they can't find something matching their requirements.
- netsharc 7y ago
  It's an interesting concept. Flood the market with Delphi programmers, then companies will accept Delphi solutions, and start asking for them too. But also the good programmers won't leave the country because outside of Turkey nobody is asking for Delphi.
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
  Well, the web paradigm is definitely being pushed hard on naive users: https://covers.magazinecloner.com/covers/194392.jpg https://covers.magazinecloner.com/covers/194392.jpg
vfclists 7y ago
Where does the part about corruption come into it?

sitkack 7y ago

Idera (nee Borland) must be stoked, they potentially just created 1 million new Delphi programmers in a 2nd world country. I'd add a bullet point to the sheet. * One million Turkish kids This isn't necessarily corruption. And we have no idea what they paid. The internet is lousy in Turkey, having a stand alone system with documentation, an IDE and a great debugger will work really well in that environment. Pascal is a perfectly fine language. In my universe they started using Racket and The New Turing Omnibus (for middle school) and then The Little ____ Books [2] and then on to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs [3] [1] https://racket-lang.org/ https://racket-lang.org/ [2] http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/books.html http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/books.html [3] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html https://github.com/sarabander/sicp https://github.com/sarabander/sicp

rolleiflex 7y ago
> The internet is lousy in Turkey Um, what? I just signed up for fiber in Istanbul, lowest plan, 25mbit, at dirt cheap $11 a month — unmetered. Meanwhile my San Francisco apartment, Comcast charges me $67 a month for a 50mbit capped one. While there is some variance in availability (just like any other country) Turkish infrastructure is generally first-world. It is for political reasons that it gets demoted into the second, but ultimately we’re talking about a place with a $25k~ GDP PPP per person [1]. That’s more than Greece’s, and climbing towards Italy’s. [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/turkey/gdp-per-capita-ppp https://tradingeconomics.com/turkey/gdp-per-capita-ppp
- maeln 7y ago
  I go to Turkey regularly and I always had a very good bandwidth on 4g, even in the middle of nowhere in Anatolia. The network is much, much better than here in France. I guess the geography of Turkey helps a lot there since they usually always have a good vantage point to put antenna. I don't know why people in this thread seem to think that Turkey is a poor developing country. It's not. Even with the recent political issues and the economical crisis, it is much better than a lot of country in Europe and in the EU.

timwaagh 7y ago

Pascal isn't necessarily the worst choice to learn programming in. After all, it was designed from the ground up for education and Delphi is one of the few environments around sporting a vb-style GUI creation interface. In high school, when i could barely program i still managed to utilize delphi to run some physics calculations. I suppose Java or C# makes more sense at the college level. But below that when the vast majority arent going to be programmers and the goal is to get them an idea of what programming is about i could think of few superior choices, if any.

Havoc 7y ago

You can do worse than Delphi for learning purposes. Would probably have picked something with a bit more job market potential though

FpUser 7y ago

I use C++/C, Delphi, JS, Python. Also Java, C#, PHP and bunch of other but on and off basis. Here is my opinion As a language Delphi/ObjectPascal is anything but ancient. It is kept up to date and has all the important features one would expect modern language to have sans garbage collection (well I actually consider this as advantage). It produces fast native executables without any dependencies. It compiles with such speed that one can write shell scripts in it. It has the right balance between a mountain of complex features C++ has and something like Go. Its IDE is nice as well and full featured. Both language and the IDE exist in paid version supported by commercial vendor and as an opensource project in case of Lazarus/FreePascal. Sure there are some problems but show me the language that does not have any, In my opinion the only REAL problems with the language/tools are all political. At some point these products were suffering from bad corporate governance and on top of that Microsoft went out of its way to actively destroy market for these in North America and along the way poached all leading developers from Borland including main language architect. To make a conclusion I think that ObjectPascal along with the implementation is a good candidate for being used in many areas as generic well thought out language along with the IDE. As for the article: I think it is a good move on Idera's side. To call it corruption is disingenuous I think. Many corporations are using the same tactic. It is friggin business.

zozbot234 7y ago
> has all the important features one would expect modern language to have sans garbage collection No RAII or ownership tracking, no borrowck, no support for concurrency free of data races. Huge deal breaker.
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  I know you are trolling, but just in case, you can implement RAII using record management operators: https://wiki.freepascal.org/management_operators https://wiki.freepascal.org/management_operators These are not in Free Pascal 3.0.6 (used in the latest Lazarus release) but they are in trunk and will be available in Free Pascal 3.2. I think they are also available in Delphi since a while now.

Zenst 7y ago

How many RPi's could they of brought instead. Heck, country that size and government backing at that scale could of thought - lets build a Turkish home made computer of rpi levels. Reading this I just can't feel like an opportunity missed.

vortico 7y ago

Turkey couldn't take over Delphi, Greece in 1920, so they take over Delphi, Embarcadero in 2020.

johtela 7y ago

Delphi is ancient - as am I. My first FOSS published in Internet was written Delphi in 1996: http://delphi.icm.edu.pl/authors/a0000824.htm http://delphi.icm.edu.pl/authors/a0000824.htm

akinbalcioglu 7y ago

This is not BUY. It is an agreement to supply the students within the curricula of 12 different courses for students to apply the projects using Delphi. It also covers an agreement t provide monthly scholarships to successful students.

zerkten 7y ago

In the UK during the nineties we had old versions of Delphi distributed on magazine covers. Magazines then carried numerous tutorials over the years that helped people get started on their programming careers when school computing courses had lost their way with a focus on IT. Computing in schools in the UK with the BBC Micro had been much more useful as a basis for learning programming, something Eben Upton called out in his Raspberry PI keynote at PyCon a number of years ago. I recall discussions with other students in my first year of uni about how they learned to program real things for family and businesses with these tools. Native and efficient Win16 and later Win32 (compared to VB runtime) programs were an exciting proposition in the 90s. Delphi could be used to create things that weren't as viable with VB. Personally, I chose C++ Builder for some reason (probably because I had heard about the industry use of C++), but even it had interesting facets, like the VCL compatibility with the Delphi toolset.

tomjen3 7y ago
That was exactly how I got my start as a programmer, except in Denmark. It is so hard to understand that today you can download Python, Ruby, Java or anything else you want for nothing, but back then those where a Big Deal.

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looper_dude 7y ago

Honest question: if the goal is to teach true OOP, why not teach Smalltalk?

Aperocky 7y ago

What a waste. Studying software programming does not start with buying licenses.

turkthrower123 7y ago

I wonder how much Delphi/Idera bribed the head of the Ministry of Industry and Technology for this boondoggle. Allahallah, and they wonder why 10% of our country is illiterate. Every single decision by the government is made from the perspective of "how can I make a lira off of this" MIIT chief Faruk Özlü just bought himself a new mansion in Mugla over the summer. Just saying.

dang 7y ago
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. Political flamewar is off topic here, regardless of how right and/or righteous your cause is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

kdtop 7y ago

Eternal truths: * New things are typically more popular than older things. * People not using ObjectPascal / Delphi love to hate on it. * People using it feel outraged at the injustice, pointing out it's merits. I have been using Delphi for about 30 yrs it seems. I have a love / hate relationship with it. Love the language and the ability to rapidly get the program I want created. Hate that version after version, the IDE STILL has stupid bugs; that the built-in help seems to get worse and worse with time (I don't want a slow web browser showing me Microsoft C calls and all sorts of irrelevant nonsense), and get very annoyed when having to get required custom components installed before being able to open a project using the components. And I REALLY dislike that they charge so bloody much for it. For business reasons I had to purchase a license that cost a few thousand dollars. Like 2 weeks later, sales people were calling me encouraging me to spend a similar amount to upgrade to the newest version that had just come out. They must have only a handful of paying customers and depend on the few to keep their entire business afloat.

rafaelvasco 7y ago

Started programming 14 years ago with Turbo Pascal. It was amazing. Good days. I remember having so much fun coding a command line application, full of blinking colors, colored text and stuff. Always have been a graphics inclined programmer.

jhoechtl 7y ago

They should have gone with Go. It's also Wirthian in spirit and is likely to get you a job.

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gabrielbauman 7y ago

I wonder why they didn't just use Lazarus. Open source Delphi. https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

zelly 7y ago

Smart. While everyone is trampling over each other to get into the tiny little door (the SaaS/FAANG/npm/golang/frontend/iOS scene), they found the smaller side door that no one else is taking. Delphi is good for ordinary line-of-business software, all the boring back office software that people take for granted in first world countries.

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fiatjaf 7y ago

I expected to see people complaining that a government spend tons of money buying licenses when there are hundreds of other languages that you can use for free out there, but instead I saw people saying Delphi is good, Delphi is bad, Pascal whatever.

kovach 7y ago

Mods please change the title to remove "buys", the article changed it's title to "Turkish ministry of education secures free access to Delphi for an estimated one million students".