4 ms·

Mine last Delphi was 7... greatest release!

petepete 5y ago
I still miss Delphi from time to time. I started with 5 and used both 6 and 7 before leaving for greener pastures. I've never used anything as productive for creating Windows applications, it was just a joy to use (in 2001-2004).
dagw 5y ago
It's kind of sad that an IDE from 2002 is the pinnacle of ease of use and productivity when it comes quickly and efficiently creating GUI applications.
- FpUser 5y ago
  For inexplicable reasons well beyond my understanding mainstream development had always gone into the most masochistic state.
- mhd 5y ago
  Now talk to some Smalltalk developers...
- askvictor 5y ago
  I usually mention this when Delphi pops up on HN - anvil.works comes close to re-creating that ease of use and productivity, but for web-apps, and in Python.
praptak 5y ago
Dunno, my gut feeling is that the decline started somewhere after Delphi 5. I haven't really used 6 but my transition from 5 to 7 was a bit crappy. I remember that Delphi 7 added lots of bells and whistles but had more cluttered UI and worse stability than 5. Most probably because 7 was supposed to be the big entry of Delphi into the web app market, which resulted in a product with felt rushed and half-baked.
- wruza 5y ago
  Idk, I remember some good things that I was surely missing in 5, and little less in 6. Upgrades were a little bumpy, but after that phase it all felt much better.
wruza 5y ago
I pretend to think that it was actually the final, complete release.
- jhgb 5y ago
  I mean, the number 7 means perfection to some people, right?
nobleach 5y ago
Same here. It was an era where the company I worked for was looking to transition to web. The web was NOWHERE near ready for a desktop-app like experience. Especially since the RAD crowd (VB, Delphi, etc) expected to drag and drop components on a canvas and wire them up in code. We saw that as the holy grail. Delphi apps were promoting a "briefcase model" client/server architecture. And we were sort leveraging that for salespeople in the field. They'd go out, do their work, and then get online to sync data when they could. The idea that they could just hit a web page and do up to the minute transactions over a dial-up internet connection was the new "holy grail". Moving to the web meant Perl:DBI, then Python/MySQL, then finally PHP4. I'll always have such a soft spot for those Delphi days though. Kylix too!

I still miss Delphi from time to time. I started with 5 and used both 6 and 7 before leaving for greener pastures. I've never used anything as productive for creating Windows applications, it was just a joy to use (in 2001-2004).

dagw 5y ago

It's kind of sad that an IDE from 2002 is the pinnacle of ease of use and productivity when it comes quickly and efficiently creating GUI applications.

FpUser 5y ago
For inexplicable reasons well beyond my understanding mainstream development had always gone into the most masochistic state.
mhd 5y ago
Now talk to some Smalltalk developers...
askvictor 5y ago
I usually mention this when Delphi pops up on HN - anvil.works comes close to re-creating that ease of use and productivity, but for web-apps, and in Python.

praptak 5y ago

Dunno, my gut feeling is that the decline started somewhere after Delphi 5. I haven't really used 6 but my transition from 5 to 7 was a bit crappy. I remember that Delphi 7 added lots of bells and whistles but had more cluttered UI and worse stability than 5. Most probably because 7 was supposed to be the big entry of Delphi into the web app market, which resulted in a product with felt rushed and half-baked.

wruza 5y ago
Idk, I remember some good things that I was surely missing in 5, and little less in 6. Upgrades were a little bumpy, but after that phase it all felt much better.

wruza 5y ago

I pretend to think that it was actually the final, complete release.

jhgb 5y ago
I mean, the number 7 means perfection to some people, right?

nobleach 5y ago

Same here. It was an era where the company I worked for was looking to transition to web. The web was NOWHERE near ready for a desktop-app like experience. Especially since the RAD crowd (VB, Delphi, etc) expected to drag and drop components on a canvas and wire them up in code. We saw that as the holy grail. Delphi apps were promoting a "briefcase model" client/server architecture. And we were sort leveraging that for salespeople in the field. They'd go out, do their work, and then get online to sync data when they could. The idea that they could just hit a web page and do up to the minute transactions over a dial-up internet connection was the new "holy grail". Moving to the web meant Perl:DBI, then Python/MySQL, then finally PHP4. I'll always have such a soft spot for those Delphi days though. Kylix too!