6 ms·

Delphi is still wildly popular especially outside of the English speaking software development world. It's a bit strange to see. The English speaking developers

by R0b0t1 5y ago

Delphi is still wildly popular especially outside of the English speaking software development world. It's a bit strange to see. The English speaking developers outside of the US are likely to be following US industry trends, but Delphi and other languages are quite entrenched in industrial programming and custom ORM designs in South America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Something really nice about Delphi is it compiles quickly. Very underrated. Modern Delphi has rough feature parity with Java with anonymous classes and functions, making it quite usable. Unfortunately those feature have not made it into FreePascal dialects yet. The guy who created Delphi went on to make C#. We might see MS's open source push give us something Delphi like yet.

pjmlp 5y ago
Indeed, here in Germany there is at least one Delphi conference, and additionally it tends to share some slots in .NET conferences.
- chadcmulligan 5y ago
  Where would you find Delphi jobs in Europe? I'm in australia but still do delphi.
  - hestefisk 5y ago
    Generally firms that work with industrial automation where speed and efficiency are key elements. In wind turbine manufacturing, for instance, I know a lot of firms still use Delphi.
    - chadcmulligan 5y ago
      Oh ok, same here then, I'm working in manufacturing, also in medical systems here, there are a few I know of.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Medical systems here as well, laboratory automation, for example https://www.lab-services.nl https://www.lab-services.nl
mobilio 5y ago
In Eastern Europe Delphi was very popular.
brnt 5y ago
How "far" behind it Freepascal you think? I tried to get into it a few years back and in terms of language features it felt like things had stagnated for a decade or more.
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  It's not that far behind but there is going to be a time investment for whoever undertakes it. The parser is very modular but documentation is sparse. It follows the EBNF notation quite closely, but adding these anonymous structures will require adding intermediate formats to track them and pass them to the machine code generator. It's pretty heavy work, but not insanely complicated. One of the gating issues seems the existing devs didn't seem to care about these features when I was looking to add them. That may be a problem for someone who does not wish to invest lots of time understanding the codebase.
branko_d 5y ago
Anders Hejlsberg is a world treasure as far as I'm concerned. After basically single-handedly creating Torbo Pascal, he was the architect of Delphi, C# and now TypeScript. I don't think that anybody touched the lives of so many programmers quite like he did.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  I owe to him, having learned that systems programming doesn't need to be C like unsafe, thanks to having learned my ways into it via TP 3.0 - 6.0, before meeting C. Having done Spectrum coding before also helped.

by R0b0t1 5y ago

pjmlp 5y ago

Indeed, here in Germany there is at least one Delphi conference, and additionally it tends to share some slots in .NET conferences.

chadcmulligan 5y ago
Where would you find Delphi jobs in Europe? I'm in australia but still do delphi.
- hestefisk 5y ago
  Generally firms that work with industrial automation where speed and efficiency are key elements. In wind turbine manufacturing, for instance, I know a lot of firms still use Delphi.
  - chadcmulligan 5y ago
    Oh ok, same here then, I'm working in manufacturing, also in medical systems here, there are a few I know of.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Medical systems here as well, laboratory automation, for example https://www.lab-services.nl https://www.lab-services.nl

mobilio 5y ago

In Eastern Europe Delphi was very popular.

brnt 5y ago

How "far" behind it Freepascal you think? I tried to get into it a few years back and in terms of language features it felt like things had stagnated for a decade or more.

R0b0t1 5y ago
It's not that far behind but there is going to be a time investment for whoever undertakes it. The parser is very modular but documentation is sparse. It follows the EBNF notation quite closely, but adding these anonymous structures will require adding intermediate formats to track them and pass them to the machine code generator. It's pretty heavy work, but not insanely complicated. One of the gating issues seems the existing devs didn't seem to care about these features when I was looking to add them. That may be a problem for someone who does not wish to invest lots of time understanding the codebase.

branko_d 5y ago

Anders Hejlsberg is a world treasure as far as I'm concerned. After basically single-handedly creating Torbo Pascal, he was the architect of Delphi, C# and now TypeScript. I don't think that anybody touched the lives of so many programmers quite like he did.

pjmlp 5y ago
I owe to him, having learned that systems programming doesn't need to be C like unsafe, thanks to having learned my ways into it via TP 3.0 - 6.0, before meeting C. Having done Spectrum coding before also helped.