9 ms·

Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins

73 points by zxspectrum1982 5y ago

zxspectrum1982 5y ago
1995 is a very important year in the history of Delphi. On February 14 of that year the first version of Delphi was released for 16-bit Windows 3.1 as a Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool. Delphi came as a departure from its predecessor, Borland’s Turbo Pascal for Windows. Turbo Pascal combined an editor, debugger, compiler, linker, and libraries, and evolved into Object Pascal after support for objects was added. Delphi / Object Pascal created a foundation for app development that still inspires and supports application developers today.
- smitty1e 5y ago
  And is apparently still available https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi
pjmlp 5y ago
And 20 years later .NET is finally catching up with Delphi on AOT support, as NGEN was only meant to improve startup times, while other toochains were dropped along the way (Singularity, Midori, .NET Native). Happy birthday Delphi!
greatgib 5y ago
Now only the name remains as a ghost... I loved so much Delphi when it was still like Delphi 5. In my opinion, GUI dev was so great and easy at that time. So much easier than today for desktop or web. For exemple, just having a reactive web app today is such a pain in the ass, when it was so easy then with component anchors and such.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  I live that experience still within Java and .NET ecosystems.
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    How? What UI toolkits?
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Windows Forms for example?
      - tluyben2 5y ago
        Yes, fair enough. Unfortunately that is not accepted a lot anymore; I make custom tools for embedded hardware with win forms and it's great but projects where UI designers get in... nope.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        Then WPF with Blend.
ochrist 5y ago
This brings back memories. Back in the late eighties I used various programming languages for fun (TI59, 6502 assembler, BBC Basic), but when I switched to Pascal, a lot of things changed for me. At that time the schools used the predecessor of Turbo Pascal, called PolyPascal - but some time later they switched to Turbo Pascal. I have used Delphi almost from the beginning and have used various versions through time. I don't always remember the system for good tings. The article mentions Oracle, and I do remember we had a hard time getting Delphi to connect properly to Oracle databases in the late nineties. This was mostly done through BDE. The official definition of that abbreviation is Borlands Database Engine, but a lot of people called it Borlands Database Error. A few years ago I got back to Delphi and what a please it is to use. The latest version of Delphi allows you to produce native code to several different platforms, and it's certainly still Rapid Application Development. But unfortunately it's not available to everybody due to the prices.
- mobilio 5y ago
  If you remember IDAPI?
ksec 5y ago
Reading this is a strange roller coaster of emotions. Happy to read about good old times, angry about the turn of event, and sadden about the current state. At the time I thought Delphi was ( and may be still is ) the Best-in-class and a target to beat for all other RAD and IDE. The future is going to be so much better for Desktop App development. Instead we have descended to Desktop Apps with Electron.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Not only that, the state of Web app tooling as well, juggling raw HTML/CSS/JS to fake a desktop like UI. There are low code tools for Web, but they tend to be only for enterprise pockets.
  - abraxas 5y ago
    Not only that but they are mostly a lipstick on the HTML/CSS/JS complexity pig and thus do little to really simplify the job. As the thin veneer peels off one is usually forced to deal with the underlying complexity anyway.
- ghosty141 5y ago
  As much as people like to shit on electron, I rather have an electron app than no app when it comes to cross-platform compatibility and features. The reason why Electron is so successful is because the other UI frameworks simply don't solve the problems people have as elegantly. Doing "custom" UI elements is super easy with CSS and there are many many developers for that, while doing so with WPF or QT requires far more skill and is a lot more quirky.
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    People don't shit on electron in general, some tech people do. We know what our computers can do when optimally programmed and there they are wasting cycles on rendering badly built web apps. I believe we should be shitting on badly written apps: we can see how a really well written very complex electron app like vscode behaves: then we install some simple crappy app that is not even in the same universe complexity wise as vscode which someone burns 100x more memory and cpu. That we should shit on imho.
ezconnect 5y ago
Delphi gave me lots of money doing freelance stuff during the 2000s because it was so fast to build custom apps on it.
Yuioup 5y ago
Delphi is dead. Nothing to see here. Move along.
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments or shallow dismissals here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- clouddrover 5y ago
  Seems like it's going pretty well. Native development on multiple platforms sounds good to me: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi
- squarefoot 5y ago
  Not dead at all, just invisible to the public thanks to Embarcadero and their prices. If you sell a development system at €1.699 up, you send the message that you rather want to deal with a few hundreds big/medium customers than millions of small ones. For us mere mortals Lazarus comes to the rescue. Not on the same league of modern Delphi editions, but very comparable to those we used when it was popular in the early 2000s.
stevecat 5y ago
Delphi was my first introduction to programming with Borland Delphi 3 on a magazine coverdisc before we had the internet. At 12 years old and just getting into computers, I considered .exe applications with their lovely grey components to be so professional and unattainable that the ability to build my own was mind-blowing. A few years later, I had some of my freeware that I'd built in Delphi featured on that same magazine's coverdisc! I eventually went down the web development route but I've recently, via Arduino, learnt C/C++, and am enjoying desktop development again. Compiling is exciting!
- salmo 5y ago
  Same experience here! It was such a great first intro for me. Learned basic programming concepts but could quickly put together something "real" feeling. It was a nice middle ground. The Pascal aspect was pretty ergonomic for a neophyte, and the GUI design really was unparalleled. Dabbled in UIs after: GTK, .NET, etc. All disappointing and awkward. Do web dev for internal tooling when I have to, but I don't enjoy it. I do backends but mostly stick to lower-level systems stuff after falling in love with K&R and Unix early in college. Well, and firefighting prod performance problems.
Lammy 5y ago
> The accepted story is that the Delphi name was originally suggested by then Borland developer Danny Thorpe as a reference to the Greek fortune-telling temple of the same name. One of the goals behind Delphi was to provide database connectivity to developers, and because Oracle was one of the more popular database products of the time, the reasoning was that “if you want to talk to the Oracle, you have to go to Delphi”. Even if it's an unintentional coincidence, Delphi is also where Apollo killed Python (which hit 1.0 in 1994) :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(mythology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(mythology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python#Version_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python#Version_1
thought_alarm 5y ago
Borland's VCL was a great achievement that brought some much needed cohesiveness and sanity to Win32 development in a way that Microsoft was never able to do. I've always found it interesting that OpenStep/Cocoa and VCL were released at about the same time in the mid-90s, as they're both so similar. Even though I was a complete C++ snob at the time, I had to admit that working with Delphi/Pascal projects was surprisingly painless. The compile times were insanely fast. But I preferred to use the VCL with C++. Well into the 2000s when .NET has completely taken over, I still felt that native VCL/C++ was the best solution for most Windows apps.
- jchw 5y ago
  I wish I had been exposed to Delphi or at least the VCL earlier. After the fact, it made me feel envious compared to using MFC and whatever else shipped with Visual C++ all the time.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  OWL did it first, also from Borland. To this day Microsoft sucks in what concerns C++ frameworks for Windows development, with C++/CX and WinRT they kind of finally nailed it, but then a group managed to bomb that effort. Most likely the same kind of devs that also bombed Longhorn efforts.
nikolay 5y ago
It's too bad that Embarcadero killed all super-popular Borland IDEs.
ipunchghosts 5y ago
I miss delphi.
xor42 5y ago
My first experience with Delphi is quite recent actually. I've done quite a lot of C/C++ programming & reverse engineering (the latter as a hobby) and recently had to scratch the itch to take a closer look into the ecosystem of a popular alarm systems manufacturer. Their hardware is well designed but the quality of their software is unfortunately not quite what you'd expect to see in this field. As such, I wanted to see what could be learnt/exploited by exploring their binaries. As it turns out, their software suite is written in Delphi, which required me to read quite a lot about it, and use/write some custom tools to help me analyze the binaries in Ghidra. An existing tool I have relied on is called IDR[0]. It relies on "knowledge bases" which are binary files generated by another project[1] from the same author to store information about all the types and classes provided by each version of Delphi. The source code of these two projects is pretty "funky" from a software engineering point of view, but quite enlightening from a research standpoint to understand how Delphi binaries are generated. I can see from this thread that a lot of people are nostalgic about how easy/enjoyable it was to use. I now find the low-level analysis of this technology just as fun and interesting. As a side note and to loop back to the reason of this whole endeavor, after many hours spent reversing the software of this manufacturer, I can attest that the rumors about the code quality are not just rumors :) [0] https://github.com/crypto2011/IDR https://github.com/crypto2011/IDR [1] https://github.com/crypto2011/KBBUILDER https://github.com/crypto2011/KBBUILDER
vijayrudraraju 5y ago
My father worked on Dbase, Turbo Pascal, Delphi... I remember going to his office in Scotts Valley growing up and playing around with Delphi when I was in elementary school. I think it was technically the first thing I ever programmed with - I made a calculator app (how creative right?).
whartung 5y ago
I'll never forget this Delphi anecdote. It can be applied to other tools, no doubt, but we were using Delphi at the time. Simply, we had a junior guy doing some work, and he wrote a Client/Server GUI using Delphi talking to SQL Server (I think, not germane). Anyway, it was all done, shipped off the client, everyone essentially happy. I asked him how the project went. Paraphrasing he said, "The project went really well, I didn't have many problems. But I do have one question." "What is it?" "Can you explain the difference between Disk and RAM?" "..." A testament to Delphi is that someone can be productive in computer programming without understanding something fundamental like RAM and Disk.
OnlyMortal 5y ago
Laughs in Turbo Pascal

zxspectrum1982 5y ago

1995 is a very important year in the history of Delphi. On February 14 of that year the first version of Delphi was released for 16-bit Windows 3.1 as a Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool. Delphi came as a departure from its predecessor, Borland’s Turbo Pascal for Windows. Turbo Pascal combined an editor, debugger, compiler, linker, and libraries, and evolved into Object Pascal after support for objects was added. Delphi / Object Pascal created a foundation for app development that still inspires and supports application developers today.

smitty1e 5y ago
And is apparently still available https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi

pjmlp 5y ago

And 20 years later .NET is finally catching up with Delphi on AOT support, as NGEN was only meant to improve startup times, while other toochains were dropped along the way (Singularity, Midori, .NET Native). Happy birthday Delphi!

greatgib 5y ago

Now only the name remains as a ghost... I loved so much Delphi when it was still like Delphi 5. In my opinion, GUI dev was so great and easy at that time. So much easier than today for desktop or web. For exemple, just having a reactive web app today is such a pain in the ass, when it was so easy then with component anchors and such.

pjmlp 5y ago
I live that experience still within Java and .NET ecosystems.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  How? What UI toolkits?
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Windows Forms for example?
    - tluyben2 5y ago
      Yes, fair enough. Unfortunately that is not accepted a lot anymore; I make custom tools for embedded hardware with win forms and it's great but projects where UI designers get in... nope.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Then WPF with Blend.

ochrist 5y ago

This brings back memories. Back in the late eighties I used various programming languages for fun (TI59, 6502 assembler, BBC Basic), but when I switched to Pascal, a lot of things changed for me. At that time the schools used the predecessor of Turbo Pascal, called PolyPascal - but some time later they switched to Turbo Pascal. I have used Delphi almost from the beginning and have used various versions through time. I don't always remember the system for good tings. The article mentions Oracle, and I do remember we had a hard time getting Delphi to connect properly to Oracle databases in the late nineties. This was mostly done through BDE. The official definition of that abbreviation is Borlands Database Engine, but a lot of people called it Borlands Database Error. A few years ago I got back to Delphi and what a please it is to use. The latest version of Delphi allows you to produce native code to several different platforms, and it's certainly still Rapid Application Development. But unfortunately it's not available to everybody due to the prices.

mobilio 5y ago
If you remember IDAPI?

ksec 5y ago

Reading this is a strange roller coaster of emotions. Happy to read about good old times, angry about the turn of event, and sadden about the current state. At the time I thought Delphi was ( and may be still is ) the Best-in-class and a target to beat for all other RAD and IDE. The future is going to be so much better for Desktop App development. Instead we have descended to Desktop Apps with Electron.

pjmlp 5y ago
Not only that, the state of Web app tooling as well, juggling raw HTML/CSS/JS to fake a desktop like UI. There are low code tools for Web, but they tend to be only for enterprise pockets.
- abraxas 5y ago
  Not only that but they are mostly a lipstick on the HTML/CSS/JS complexity pig and thus do little to really simplify the job. As the thin veneer peels off one is usually forced to deal with the underlying complexity anyway.
ghosty141 5y ago
As much as people like to shit on electron, I rather have an electron app than no app when it comes to cross-platform compatibility and features. The reason why Electron is so successful is because the other UI frameworks simply don't solve the problems people have as elegantly. Doing "custom" UI elements is super easy with CSS and there are many many developers for that, while doing so with WPF or QT requires far more skill and is a lot more quirky.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  People don't shit on electron in general, some tech people do. We know what our computers can do when optimally programmed and there they are wasting cycles on rendering badly built web apps. I believe we should be shitting on badly written apps: we can see how a really well written very complex electron app like vscode behaves: then we install some simple crappy app that is not even in the same universe complexity wise as vscode which someone burns 100x more memory and cpu. That we should shit on imho.

ezconnect 5y ago

Delphi gave me lots of money doing freelance stuff during the 2000s because it was so fast to build custom apps on it.

Yuioup 5y ago

Delphi is dead. Nothing to see here. Move along.

dang 5y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive comments or shallow dismissals here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
clouddrover 5y ago
Seems like it's going pretty well. Native development on multiple platforms sounds good to me: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi
squarefoot 5y ago
Not dead at all, just invisible to the public thanks to Embarcadero and their prices. If you sell a development system at €1.699 up, you send the message that you rather want to deal with a few hundreds big/medium customers than millions of small ones. For us mere mortals Lazarus comes to the rescue. Not on the same league of modern Delphi editions, but very comparable to those we used when it was popular in the early 2000s.

stevecat 5y ago

Delphi was my first introduction to programming with Borland Delphi 3 on a magazine coverdisc before we had the internet. At 12 years old and just getting into computers, I considered .exe applications with their lovely grey components to be so professional and unattainable that the ability to build my own was mind-blowing. A few years later, I had some of my freeware that I'd built in Delphi featured on that same magazine's coverdisc! I eventually went down the web development route but I've recently, via Arduino, learnt C/C++, and am enjoying desktop development again. Compiling is exciting!

salmo 5y ago
Same experience here! It was such a great first intro for me. Learned basic programming concepts but could quickly put together something "real" feeling. It was a nice middle ground. The Pascal aspect was pretty ergonomic for a neophyte, and the GUI design really was unparalleled. Dabbled in UIs after: GTK, .NET, etc. All disappointing and awkward. Do web dev for internal tooling when I have to, but I don't enjoy it. I do backends but mostly stick to lower-level systems stuff after falling in love with K&R and Unix early in college. Well, and firefighting prod performance problems.

Lammy 5y ago

> The accepted story is that the Delphi name was originally suggested by then Borland developer Danny Thorpe as a reference to the Greek fortune-telling temple of the same name. One of the goals behind Delphi was to provide database connectivity to developers, and because Oracle was one of the more popular database products of the time, the reasoning was that “if you want to talk to the Oracle, you have to go to Delphi”. Even if it's an unintentional coincidence, Delphi is also where Apollo killed Python (which hit 1.0 in 1994) :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(mythology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(mythology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python#Version_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python#Version_1

thought_alarm 5y ago

Borland's VCL was a great achievement that brought some much needed cohesiveness and sanity to Win32 development in a way that Microsoft was never able to do. I've always found it interesting that OpenStep/Cocoa and VCL were released at about the same time in the mid-90s, as they're both so similar. Even though I was a complete C++ snob at the time, I had to admit that working with Delphi/Pascal projects was surprisingly painless. The compile times were insanely fast. But I preferred to use the VCL with C++. Well into the 2000s when .NET has completely taken over, I still felt that native VCL/C++ was the best solution for most Windows apps.

jchw 5y ago
I wish I had been exposed to Delphi or at least the VCL earlier. After the fact, it made me feel envious compared to using MFC and whatever else shipped with Visual C++ all the time.
pjmlp 5y ago
OWL did it first, also from Borland. To this day Microsoft sucks in what concerns C++ frameworks for Windows development, with C++/CX and WinRT they kind of finally nailed it, but then a group managed to bomb that effort. Most likely the same kind of devs that also bombed Longhorn efforts.

nikolay 5y ago

It's too bad that Embarcadero killed all super-popular Borland IDEs.

ipunchghosts 5y ago

I miss delphi.

xor42 5y ago

My first experience with Delphi is quite recent actually. I've done quite a lot of C/C++ programming & reverse engineering (the latter as a hobby) and recently had to scratch the itch to take a closer look into the ecosystem of a popular alarm systems manufacturer. Their hardware is well designed but the quality of their software is unfortunately not quite what you'd expect to see in this field. As such, I wanted to see what could be learnt/exploited by exploring their binaries. As it turns out, their software suite is written in Delphi, which required me to read quite a lot about it, and use/write some custom tools to help me analyze the binaries in Ghidra. An existing tool I have relied on is called IDR[0]. It relies on "knowledge bases" which are binary files generated by another project[1] from the same author to store information about all the types and classes provided by each version of Delphi. The source code of these two projects is pretty "funky" from a software engineering point of view, but quite enlightening from a research standpoint to understand how Delphi binaries are generated. I can see from this thread that a lot of people are nostalgic about how easy/enjoyable it was to use. I now find the low-level analysis of this technology just as fun and interesting. As a side note and to loop back to the reason of this whole endeavor, after many hours spent reversing the software of this manufacturer, I can attest that the rumors about the code quality are not just rumors :) [0] https://github.com/crypto2011/IDR https://github.com/crypto2011/IDR [1] https://github.com/crypto2011/KBBUILDER https://github.com/crypto2011/KBBUILDER

vijayrudraraju 5y ago

My father worked on Dbase, Turbo Pascal, Delphi... I remember going to his office in Scotts Valley growing up and playing around with Delphi when I was in elementary school. I think it was technically the first thing I ever programmed with - I made a calculator app (how creative right?).

whartung 5y ago

I'll never forget this Delphi anecdote. It can be applied to other tools, no doubt, but we were using Delphi at the time. Simply, we had a junior guy doing some work, and he wrote a Client/Server GUI using Delphi talking to SQL Server (I think, not germane). Anyway, it was all done, shipped off the client, everyone essentially happy. I asked him how the project went. Paraphrasing he said, "The project went really well, I didn't have many problems. But I do have one question." "What is it?" "Can you explain the difference between Disk and RAM?" "..." A testament to Delphi is that someone can be productive in computer programming without understanding something fundamental like RAM and Disk.

OnlyMortal 5y ago

Laughs in Turbo Pascal