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Programming in the past was far easier, you had better tools, like Visual Basic, and Delphi. They had excellent built in documentation, with working code exampl
by mikewarot 4y ago
Programming in the past was far easier, you had better tools, like Visual Basic, and Delphi. They had excellent built in documentation, with working code examples. Delphi even included an installation builder, for bundling your program. It all just worked. Your program would run in any Windows environment you or your customers were ever likely to use.
For the most part, those programs written with those tools still work.
Today everything is update on the fly, and subject to random breakage. GIT is better, everything else has gone downhill.
- coliveira 4y agoWhat I found incredible is that the new generation doesn't even know the feeling of working in an environment that gives you the power you had with something like Delphi, Borland Pascal, or Visual Basic. With one of these tools you could create pretty much any kind of application you wanted (with VB maybe you needed some Visual C++ for the difficult parts). Today's new developers have to deal with a landscape that is, in my opinion, discouraging. You have to spend a huge amount of time setting up environments, creating sane default configurations, and learning about hundreds of dependencies, before you can even start creating something that would be considered semi-useful.
- ipaddr 4y agoIt worked great until you had to install it on a machine that didn't have the vb runtime. The browser removed that aspect which was handy.
- makapuf 4y agoUntil it was not and we redeployed a much heavier runtime in the form of electron.
- nope96 4y agoWhat I loved about Turbo Pascal (and probably Delphi), was you could put the cursor under any function, press F1, and get documentation that showed that function being used in an example problem. Great way to learn.
- TheGrassyKnoll 4y agoTurbo Pascal was a GREAT tool; it was like a breath of fresh air. It was 'fast' even on an 8086.