5 ms·

I used to love Delphi in the late 90s, and if someone could do a late-90s-Delphi-like experience for programming UI-heavy software today, and do it right, and i

by gyulai 7y ago

I used to love Delphi in the late 90s, and if someone could do a late-90s-Delphi-like experience for programming UI-heavy software today, and do it right, and in a way that properly integrates with the anno 2020 tech landscape, then I would love to use such a thing. In a bout of late 90s nostalgia, I convinced my then-employer in 2011 to buy a license for the professional version of Delphi for a software project I was doing, and I was just absolutely shocked about how far it had fallen behind the curve. It seemed that attempting to support a modern tech ecosystem while maintaining some semblance of backwards-compatibility was giving it the worst of both worlds. Add to that enterprise bloat. I don't know what it's like today, but I sincerely hope that someone will get it back on the right track (or has already done so, as I haven't retried since my experience in 2011).

dvdhsu 7y ago
Hi there! I’m working on Retool (https://retool.com https://retool.com), which is “Delphi in the cloud”. The goal, as you said, is to make it easier and faster to build “UI-heavy software”. If anybody has any comments or suggestions on how we could market something like this, please let me know! In david@. Thanks!
- aaronheid 7y ago
  Looks promising, Amazon MWS API would be great to have
- gyulai 7y ago
  Not sure exactly where your product lands in a continuum between where Delphi was in the late 90s and where Microsoft Access was in the late 90s with its ability to create forms on top of databases, or maybe Oracle Forms. Delphi was the more heavy-duty option for cases that involved a more substantial investment in coding-up actual logic. Now when I think "substantial investment" and then look at your website, what comes to mind is "lock-in nightmare". Sorry, not trying to be cruel, just wanting to give you an honest opinion. I mean: Picture a development team pouring real efforts into development work, then training end-users to use the final product. That represents a real investment. And that investment is then locked into a vendor, where it's unclear what will happen to that investment if the vendor should decide to change the pricing model or go out of business. I guess the original Delphi did have that problem, but the world was just a different one in the late 90s. You bought your copy of Delphi on a CD with a perpetual license, and an organization that had lock-in to Windows NT software would see it as a perfectly viable path, to keep those Windows NT systems running for the next 20 years to recoup any investment in software. Plus Microsoft was actually pretty good (and continues to be good) at establishing backwards-compatibility.
  - thu2111 7y ago
    That applies to any platform though. It being open source doesn't mean it won't be abandoned or become poorly maintained. Look at the massive churn web frameworks have seen. Cloud tooling definitely has the problem that vendor financial troubles = a sudden "our incredible journey" and poof, your app is gone. That's something client side apps don't have to worry about.
vintagedave 7y ago
> I sincerely hope that someone will get it back on the right track (or has already done so ... 2020 Delphi supports five platforms, has 64-bit compilers everywhere, has modern language features, interoperates with C++ through C++Builder, and more. In the past few years especially, we've* seen both a lot of work on it, and increasing interest in using it. It's modern, and used more widely than one might realise. * "We've": This is a personal HN account but I work on Delphi and C++Builder.
- gyulai 7y ago
  Thanks for chiming in! I'll give it another spin, if I get some time.
  - gyulai 7y ago
    ...although language features, 64bit, and integration with C++ were never really where my quarrels were. If we take "rapid application development" out of its trademarked context, applying just its common-sense meaning, and applying it to the year 2020, then the modern tech ecosystem that one would want to integrate with is clearly not C++, but rather maybe JavaScript & the browser ecosystem, Python, and low-overhead JVM langauges like Scala or Groovy. The next thing that immediately jumps out at me is that the form designer is still using pixel-based positioning, instead of layout managers and units of length that we know from html, like em (fontsize-based), or vh/vw (percent of view-height/view-width), etc. I was trying to research these things more extensively just now, but giving you my name, street address, company, phone number, and then "Error: Field required: Yes, I would like to receive marketing communications" for downloading the COMMUNITY edition? Come on! Enterprise bloat: Check.
    - gyulai 7y ago
      Haha. 10 minutes further into my Delphi-in-2020-exploration (60% of which was the time that the installer actually took), this was the sequence of events: * Hit the installer and switched windows, to let the installer work in the background. * Installer mysteriously gone. * Tried to run the programme, and it took some digging to understand that the product seems to be in a half-installed state. * Re-run the installer. This time, keeping the installer in the foreground. Now it works. * Started Delphi. * Dropped a button in the form designer to start playing around. * Oh gosh. Form designer still using pixel-based layouts. * Deleted the button. * Doing some Googling to figure out how to do layout managers, and found an interesting youtube tutorial on something called TGridLayout. * Dropped a TGridLayout on my form. * Form Designer now caught in an infinite loop bringing up an Error modal that says "Control TButton($17EE2200) has no parent window. Path: ~TButton($17EE2200)". Thanks Delphi! See you again, another 10 years from now.
danmg 7y ago
Wasn't this the idea behind WinForms and VS.NET? I even think some of the original Delphi people worked on it.

by gyulai 7y ago

dvdhsu 7y ago

Hi there! I’m working on Retool (https://retool.com https://retool.com), which is “Delphi in the cloud”. The goal, as you said, is to make it easier and faster to build “UI-heavy software”. If anybody has any comments or suggestions on how we could market something like this, please let me know! In david@. Thanks!

aaronheid 7y ago
Looks promising, Amazon MWS API would be great to have
gyulai 7y ago
Not sure exactly where your product lands in a continuum between where Delphi was in the late 90s and where Microsoft Access was in the late 90s with its ability to create forms on top of databases, or maybe Oracle Forms. Delphi was the more heavy-duty option for cases that involved a more substantial investment in coding-up actual logic. Now when I think "substantial investment" and then look at your website, what comes to mind is "lock-in nightmare". Sorry, not trying to be cruel, just wanting to give you an honest opinion. I mean: Picture a development team pouring real efforts into development work, then training end-users to use the final product. That represents a real investment. And that investment is then locked into a vendor, where it's unclear what will happen to that investment if the vendor should decide to change the pricing model or go out of business. I guess the original Delphi did have that problem, but the world was just a different one in the late 90s. You bought your copy of Delphi on a CD with a perpetual license, and an organization that had lock-in to Windows NT software would see it as a perfectly viable path, to keep those Windows NT systems running for the next 20 years to recoup any investment in software. Plus Microsoft was actually pretty good (and continues to be good) at establishing backwards-compatibility.
- thu2111 7y ago
  That applies to any platform though. It being open source doesn't mean it won't be abandoned or become poorly maintained. Look at the massive churn web frameworks have seen. Cloud tooling definitely has the problem that vendor financial troubles = a sudden "our incredible journey" and poof, your app is gone. That's something client side apps don't have to worry about.

vintagedave 7y ago

> I sincerely hope that someone will get it back on the right track (or has already done so ... 2020 Delphi supports five platforms, has 64-bit compilers everywhere, has modern language features, interoperates with C++ through C++Builder, and more. In the past few years especially, we've* seen both a lot of work on it, and increasing interest in using it. It's modern, and used more widely than one might realise. * "We've": This is a personal HN account but I work on Delphi and C++Builder.

gyulai 7y ago
Thanks for chiming in! I'll give it another spin, if I get some time.
- gyulai 7y ago
  ...although language features, 64bit, and integration with C++ were never really where my quarrels were. If we take "rapid application development" out of its trademarked context, applying just its common-sense meaning, and applying it to the year 2020, then the modern tech ecosystem that one would want to integrate with is clearly not C++, but rather maybe JavaScript & the browser ecosystem, Python, and low-overhead JVM langauges like Scala or Groovy. The next thing that immediately jumps out at me is that the form designer is still using pixel-based positioning, instead of layout managers and units of length that we know from html, like em (fontsize-based), or vh/vw (percent of view-height/view-width), etc. I was trying to research these things more extensively just now, but giving you my name, street address, company, phone number, and then "Error: Field required: Yes, I would like to receive marketing communications" for downloading the COMMUNITY edition? Come on! Enterprise bloat: Check.
  - gyulai 7y ago
    Haha. 10 minutes further into my Delphi-in-2020-exploration (60% of which was the time that the installer actually took), this was the sequence of events: * Hit the installer and switched windows, to let the installer work in the background. * Installer mysteriously gone. * Tried to run the programme, and it took some digging to understand that the product seems to be in a half-installed state. * Re-run the installer. This time, keeping the installer in the foreground. Now it works. * Started Delphi. * Dropped a button in the form designer to start playing around. * Oh gosh. Form designer still using pixel-based layouts. * Deleted the button. * Doing some Googling to figure out how to do layout managers, and found an interesting youtube tutorial on something called TGridLayout. * Dropped a TGridLayout on my form. * Form Designer now caught in an infinite loop bringing up an Error modal that says "Control TButton($17EE2200) has no parent window. Path: ~TButton($17EE2200)". Thanks Delphi! See you again, another 10 years from now.

danmg 7y ago

Wasn't this the idea behind WinForms and VS.NET? I even think some of the original Delphi people worked on it.