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I made my first substantial, steady paycheck with Delphi. It was pretty great for its time, and it really lowered the barrier for entry into programming, and es
by m0zg 7y ago
I made my first substantial, steady paycheck with Delphi. It was pretty great for its time, and it really lowered the barrier for entry into programming, and especially GUI-based programming. I wasn't a huge fan of Pascal, so I ended up continuing to work in C++ Builder, but this stuff was _such_ a breath of fresh air back when Microsoft tooling sucked real bad, and Visual Studio was not "visual" at all. There were entire sites chock full of reusable Delphi/C++ Builder components that you could just download and easily integrate into your code. Then Borland lost Anders Hejlsberg, and Microsoft gained Anders Hejlsberg, and within a few years we saw C# (clearly inspired by Object Pascal) and Windows Forms (clearly inspired by VCL).
- tenant 7y agoMS Visual Basic had windows forms as long as Delphi if not longer and long long before .net came along.
- lmz 7y agoI think that was referring to "Windows Forms" the .NET library, not Windows forms in general.
- tenant 7y agoOK but I've used vb6, vb.net, Delphi (and Lazarus) and they are all pretty much identical in terms of dropping in controls onto a form, writing event handler code and setting properties. So to claim that delphi's vcl is clearly the inspiration for this in .net is a bit of a stretch.
- m0zg 7y agoThey are very similar architecturally and in terms of language features, to the point where someone with Object Pascal background would feel right at home. Also it was the first Microsoft visual UI design framework backed by a _real_ programming language.