5 ms·

The lack of any free or hobbyist-priced editions when everybody else was giving away their tooling for free more or less killed it off. It is still beloved by

The lack of any free or hobbyist-priced editions when everybody else was giving away their tooling for free more or less killed it off. It is still beloved by it's acolytes and there are a handful people out there who learned Delphi 20 years ago and stubbornly refuse to use anything else. It's an uphill struggle though because no-one releases a Delphi SDK for anything anymore.

markus_zhang 6y ago
Just curious why don't they do that now? Like a community edition. I guess that's because there are still some licensed editions out there and they are OK with the $$ they bring in. But what about the future?
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  They do do that: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-download/ https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-dow... It's just way, way late to the party, so most guests left :(
  - markus_zhang 6y ago
    Oh that's so sad. Personally I never used Pascal/Delphi because I was barred from using a computer (because my father thought I'd just play games instead of learning anything useful) until late into the 90s and I was not in a CS major, but my father used it extensively as he worked as Math-turned-CS professor in a University and Pascal was pretty popular at the time. I also read the book about Borland vs Microsoft and kind of feeling sorry that Pascal/Delphi didn't make it. Just a question, say I wanna develop a 2d map editor for Windows 10, does Delphi win over C# in the sense of RAD?
    - magicalhippo 6y ago
      So as someone who's spent the majority of my programming career using Delphi, it's sadly a bit difficult to give a resounding yes to that. I do think that for small programs and utilities Delphi is hard to beat. But C# has become a much more capable and feature rich language, the RAD story isn't terrible for smaller projects (no experience on larger), and you'll have a significantly larger community in the .Net camp. This means more libraries, as well as more articles and people to ask.
    - badsectoracula 6y ago
      Try Lazarus / Free Pascal, it is essentially a free and open source Delphi (really, it has even similar API and some companies who release middleware for Delphi also release it for Lazarus) without the bloat and with support for multiple platforms using each platform's native controls (Delphi also added support for multiple platforms in recent years but it uses some custom mobile-styled widget set that looks alien everywhere). Under Linux you can even choose between Qt and Gtk. As for your question, here is a video i made ~5 years ago making a simple 2D tilemap editor under Windows - starts from installing Lazarus (as well as a small image editor i wrote in VB5 :-P) to making the editor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3JgeIUo1X0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3JgeIUo1X0 Also as a bonus here is another video where i make a swapping tile puzzle game (this time under Linux, also includes installing FPC from repository and building Lazarus from source code which IMO is the best way to install it under Linux as to avoid issues common with packaging): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_01Xhd2EJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_01Xhd2EJM Note these aren't tutorials (they do not even have sound), just screencasts. I thought about buying some mic and making some tutorials but i do not think my voice sounds that good :-P
      - markus_zhang 6y ago
        Hah! That looks cool man, and exactly what I want to work on. Back then I only know C++ and didn't use any library, so I used SDL and directly blit some "buttons" onto the screen. Pretty ugly as I had to work out a simple GUI framework by myself, all those callback things.
      - DelphiABall 6y ago
        I'm not sure I agree on the comments about the mobile framework (FireMonkey - FMX for short) looking alien everywhere. The components are platform aware and provide pixel perfect representations of the controls on each platform (that is, if you don't select on a number of them to provide the actual platform specific component) e.g. You can choose for TEdit to provide a styled control, or the actual native edit control. There are pro's and cons to both, and the style option means you can make some very cool looking UI's very quickly. I would agree some of the early implementations were a little rough around the edges, but the FMX framework is now about 9 years matured into the market. Other frameworks trying to achieve the same are clearly learning a lot from FMX and openly mirroring the architecture and approach, which tells you something about the direction.
  - vram22 6y ago
    They did it for a while earlier too, circa 2006 with Turbo Delphi Explorer for Win 32 and .NET - two versions. Used both some. E.g.: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2010/08/digital-clock-v10-in-3-lines-of-delphi.html?m=0 https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2010/08/digital-clock-v10-in-3-l... Link for clock image in above post is broken, sorry. It was a one line digital display that showed time in HH MM SS format, live.
    - magicalhippo 6y ago
      True, however that earlier attempt was quite restricted which limited its usefulness.
      - vram22 6y ago
        Right. Forgot to mention that earlier. IIRC, two key useful features missing were the ability to import and use third-party components[1], and any built-in database-aware controls functionality[2]. They stripped out those two for the two Explorer versions. [1] That is a key feature of such 4GL-like RAD tools such as VB and Delphi, and a major reason for their success, coming somewhat close to the concept and holy grail of software reuse, like Software ICs/components, first propounded ages ago by Brad Cox: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Cox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Cox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_component https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_component Adding a link for hardware ICs, the parent concept, which is also quite interesting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit [2] Removing database controls was another bad idea, because so many apps, even command-line or GUI utilities (not just line-of-business or enterprise apps, need DB support in the programming tool used to develop them. So they are restricting the ability to evaluate two very important Delphi features which can swing a buy/no-buy decision.

markus_zhang 6y ago

Just curious why don't they do that now? Like a community edition. I guess that's because there are still some licensed editions out there and they are OK with the $$ they bring in. But what about the future?

magicalhippo 6y ago
They do do that: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-download/ https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-dow... It's just way, way late to the party, so most guests left :(
- markus_zhang 6y ago
  Oh that's so sad. Personally I never used Pascal/Delphi because I was barred from using a computer (because my father thought I'd just play games instead of learning anything useful) until late into the 90s and I was not in a CS major, but my father used it extensively as he worked as Math-turned-CS professor in a University and Pascal was pretty popular at the time. I also read the book about Borland vs Microsoft and kind of feeling sorry that Pascal/Delphi didn't make it. Just a question, say I wanna develop a 2d map editor for Windows 10, does Delphi win over C# in the sense of RAD?
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    So as someone who's spent the majority of my programming career using Delphi, it's sadly a bit difficult to give a resounding yes to that. I do think that for small programs and utilities Delphi is hard to beat. But C# has become a much more capable and feature rich language, the RAD story isn't terrible for smaller projects (no experience on larger), and you'll have a significantly larger community in the .Net camp. This means more libraries, as well as more articles and people to ask.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    Try Lazarus / Free Pascal, it is essentially a free and open source Delphi (really, it has even similar API and some companies who release middleware for Delphi also release it for Lazarus) without the bloat and with support for multiple platforms using each platform's native controls (Delphi also added support for multiple platforms in recent years but it uses some custom mobile-styled widget set that looks alien everywhere). Under Linux you can even choose between Qt and Gtk. As for your question, here is a video i made ~5 years ago making a simple 2D tilemap editor under Windows - starts from installing Lazarus (as well as a small image editor i wrote in VB5 :-P) to making the editor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3JgeIUo1X0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3JgeIUo1X0 Also as a bonus here is another video where i make a swapping tile puzzle game (this time under Linux, also includes installing FPC from repository and building Lazarus from source code which IMO is the best way to install it under Linux as to avoid issues common with packaging): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_01Xhd2EJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_01Xhd2EJM Note these aren't tutorials (they do not even have sound), just screencasts. I thought about buying some mic and making some tutorials but i do not think my voice sounds that good :-P
    - markus_zhang 6y ago
      Hah! That looks cool man, and exactly what I want to work on. Back then I only know C++ and didn't use any library, so I used SDL and directly blit some "buttons" onto the screen. Pretty ugly as I had to work out a simple GUI framework by myself, all those callback things.
    - DelphiABall 6y ago
      I'm not sure I agree on the comments about the mobile framework (FireMonkey - FMX for short) looking alien everywhere. The components are platform aware and provide pixel perfect representations of the controls on each platform (that is, if you don't select on a number of them to provide the actual platform specific component) e.g. You can choose for TEdit to provide a styled control, or the actual native edit control. There are pro's and cons to both, and the style option means you can make some very cool looking UI's very quickly. I would agree some of the early implementations were a little rough around the edges, but the FMX framework is now about 9 years matured into the market. Other frameworks trying to achieve the same are clearly learning a lot from FMX and openly mirroring the architecture and approach, which tells you something about the direction.
- vram22 6y ago
  They did it for a while earlier too, circa 2006 with Turbo Delphi Explorer for Win 32 and .NET - two versions. Used both some. E.g.: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2010/08/digital-clock-v10-in-3-lines-of-delphi.html?m=0 https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2010/08/digital-clock-v10-in-3-l... Link for clock image in above post is broken, sorry. It was a one line digital display that showed time in HH MM SS format, live.
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    True, however that earlier attempt was quite restricted which limited its usefulness.
    - vram22 6y ago
      Right. Forgot to mention that earlier. IIRC, two key useful features missing were the ability to import and use third-party components[1], and any built-in database-aware controls functionality[2]. They stripped out those two for the two Explorer versions. [1] That is a key feature of such 4GL-like RAD tools such as VB and Delphi, and a major reason for their success, coming somewhat close to the concept and holy grail of software reuse, like Software ICs/components, first propounded ages ago by Brad Cox: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Cox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Cox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_component https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_component Adding a link for hardware ICs, the parent concept, which is also quite interesting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit [2] Removing database controls was another bad idea, because so many apps, even command-line or GUI utilities (not just line-of-business or enterprise apps, need DB support in the programming tool used to develop them. So they are restricting the ability to evaluate two very important Delphi features which can swing a buy/no-buy decision.