4 ms·

I think I've posted it before, but I'll repeat myself nevertheless: Delphi was my first contact with programming. I was probably 13 or 14 years old and had no

I think I've posted it before, but I'll repeat myself nevertheless: Delphi was my first contact with programming. I was probably 13 or 14 years old and had no idea what I was doing, but I could resize the windows, add items to lists, change the color of Strings and place buttons and stuff like this. So, _obviously_ I needed the Delphi 6 Enterprise edition which a friend had (pirated of course) and gave it to me on one of those really cheap CD-R with that distinctive plastic smell. One of the first "real programs" we wrote was something to read sensor data via the parallel port. It was for a school project where a belt had to move and then stop, once the light barrier would sense something. We killed lots of parallel ports in doing that, because we just didn't knew how to do it. Didn't really write anything more useful at that time, but it showed me that there's a world behind what we see and know as "programs". Maybe it laid some fundations in my brain, who knows. Every time I see Delphi pop up I think I should probably have a look at it. But I'm a web monkey now. Lost for everything good, but I like to think back of the 14 year old me. Better times.

nezirus 6y ago
My experience was very similar to yours, playing around with components and forms on Delphi 3; But in addition to that I've managed to learn some assembly with Delphi (asm blocks), go figure. And the speed of the compiler on my venerable Pentium MMX 166MHz!!! (Sad looks towards my Rust build on a 100x more powerful computer :-( )
binwiederhier 6y ago
This could have been written by me. I loved Delphi and learned how to write software using Delphi 5. We got a cheap copy from school so I didn't have to pirate it. I still have that printout of the class hierarchy of the standard library and the CD ROM. I loved Delphi and I'll be forever grateful for the lessons I've learned.
loa_in_ 6y ago
My beginnings were Turbo Pascal and Delphi. I guess I got spoiled because I never found an IDE where GUI design was do intuitive and easy afterwards
- andi999 6y ago
  Yes. I do not understand why GUI designing is not getting better.
FpUser 6y ago
>"... But I'm a web monkey now." For the most part I was spared of this fate. I do everything from firmware to enterprise applications. Delphi/Lazarus are still both in my toolset for Windows and Raspberry Pi GUI based projects. Most of the time it is C++ based servers though. I was entertaining QT at some point but it feels like a legal minefield with all their licensing shenanigans to me.
myth2018 6y ago
+1 here. I already had a background on electronics and, lucky me, I burnt no parallel ports. When I joined the university I met a guy who built amateur solid motor rockets and I designed and built a prototype atmospheric probe for it. It measured temperature and barometric pressure only, and a program in Delphi 7 downloaded the data from a PIC mcu via parallel port, displayed them in a grid and stored them in a Paradox table (by then, I didn't know there was a difference between databases and tables and couldn't understand all that excitement some of my colleagues felt about Oracle, MSSQL and alikes. "They are mere files to store tabular data", I used to think). By then, that was the most complex project I had built, and I can still feel the proud and the happiness so vividly. I was so ignorant about so many things that it didn't even occurr to me to look for information on the internet. And, anyway, it seems that the modus operandi by the time wasn't that -- nowadays we go right into the internet to look for the most suitable lib to the task. I just got the data sheets, the docs and examples installed along Delphi, and found my way through. It wasn't productive, but those were definitely good times.
fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
Yeah, it was my introduction to programming too, but I was six or seven at the time.

nezirus 6y ago

My experience was very similar to yours, playing around with components and forms on Delphi 3; But in addition to that I've managed to learn some assembly with Delphi (asm blocks), go figure. And the speed of the compiler on my venerable Pentium MMX 166MHz!!! (Sad looks towards my Rust build on a 100x more powerful computer :-( )

binwiederhier 6y ago

This could have been written by me. I loved Delphi and learned how to write software using Delphi 5. We got a cheap copy from school so I didn't have to pirate it. I still have that printout of the class hierarchy of the standard library and the CD ROM. I loved Delphi and I'll be forever grateful for the lessons I've learned.

loa_in_ 6y ago

My beginnings were Turbo Pascal and Delphi. I guess I got spoiled because I never found an IDE where GUI design was do intuitive and easy afterwards

andi999 6y ago
Yes. I do not understand why GUI designing is not getting better.

FpUser 6y ago

>"... But I'm a web monkey now." For the most part I was spared of this fate. I do everything from firmware to enterprise applications. Delphi/Lazarus are still both in my toolset for Windows and Raspberry Pi GUI based projects. Most of the time it is C++ based servers though. I was entertaining QT at some point but it feels like a legal minefield with all their licensing shenanigans to me.

myth2018 6y ago

+1 here. I already had a background on electronics and, lucky me, I burnt no parallel ports. When I joined the university I met a guy who built amateur solid motor rockets and I designed and built a prototype atmospheric probe for it. It measured temperature and barometric pressure only, and a program in Delphi 7 downloaded the data from a PIC mcu via parallel port, displayed them in a grid and stored them in a Paradox table (by then, I didn't know there was a difference between databases and tables and couldn't understand all that excitement some of my colleagues felt about Oracle, MSSQL and alikes. "They are mere files to store tabular data", I used to think). By then, that was the most complex project I had built, and I can still feel the proud and the happiness so vividly. I was so ignorant about so many things that it didn't even occurr to me to look for information on the internet. And, anyway, it seems that the modus operandi by the time wasn't that -- nowadays we go right into the internet to look for the most suitable lib to the task. I just got the data sheets, the docs and examples installed along Delphi, and found my way through. It wasn't productive, but those were definitely good times.

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago

Yeah, it was my introduction to programming too, but I was six or seven at the time.