4 ms·

The new hotness was C++. Object orientation was the AI of its day. TP jumped on it so fast with 5.5 it ended up throwing away that object model for Delphi a few

The new hotness was C++. Object orientation was the AI of its day. TP jumped on it so fast with 5.5 it ended up throwing away that object model for Delphi a few years later. TP had little impact on Windows, I agree. TP was for a particular niche, small software shops targeting DOS. And it was a big success, it paid for a nice building in Scotts Valley, but it also fuelled the ambitions of a bunch of executives who got derailed, getting into databases, a multi-pronged bet (Paradox, dBASE, Interbase) that didn't really pay off.

greenthrow 2y ago
One place I worked in the 90s had a bunch of meetings/tutorials to try to sell all the C programmers on Object Oriented Programming in general and C++ in particular -- the software in question was super complicated and massive and IMHO could have benefitted from some judicious application of OOP concepts like separation of concerns -- but it got caught in a rut of just constantly trying to explain OOP to middle aged programmers who had only ever written and thought in imperitive code.
overanalytcl 2y ago
Don't forget about the time Borland really thought they could outsmart Microsoft on .NET and gave us the wonderfully horrible Delphi 8. To put it into a metaphor, Delphi 7 was like XP, Delphi 8 was like Vista. People still use D7 while Borland and Embarcadero wants to forget they ever tried D8 (and Delphi Prism which is just rebranded Oxygene). And at about the same time they also tried doing a native Delphi for Linux, which was so bad they pulled out after 3 versions and never tried Linux again until recently (and even then, you can only cross-compile, you can't run Delphi 12 on Linux or macOS). And they also tried getting into the VCS sphere with StarTeam (which somehow still received updates well into 2017... Despite it being made in 1995). I don't know why OpenText decided to buy it in 2023. Let's not forget about Turbo Prolog and the time they almost did a Turbo Modula-2, but it was actually published by TopSpeed and now lives in Clarion. Ugh. Borland... Err, Inprise... Err, Embarcadero... Or CodeGear? Or Idera? Who keeps count? Anyway, that switched so many hands it's sad to see. They were doing way too much. A lot of bad decisions made them less and less popular (not like their current greed is helping their case). Oh well. Long live Free Pascal.

greenthrow 2y ago

One place I worked in the 90s had a bunch of meetings/tutorials to try to sell all the C programmers on Object Oriented Programming in general and C++ in particular -- the software in question was super complicated and massive and IMHO could have benefitted from some judicious application of OOP concepts like separation of concerns -- but it got caught in a rut of just constantly trying to explain OOP to middle aged programmers who had only ever written and thought in imperitive code.

overanalytcl 2y ago

Don't forget about the time Borland really thought they could outsmart Microsoft on .NET and gave us the wonderfully horrible Delphi 8. To put it into a metaphor, Delphi 7 was like XP, Delphi 8 was like Vista. People still use D7 while Borland and Embarcadero wants to forget they ever tried D8 (and Delphi Prism which is just rebranded Oxygene). And at about the same time they also tried doing a native Delphi for Linux, which was so bad they pulled out after 3 versions and never tried Linux again until recently (and even then, you can only cross-compile, you can't run Delphi 12 on Linux or macOS). And they also tried getting into the VCS sphere with StarTeam (which somehow still received updates well into 2017... Despite it being made in 1995). I don't know why OpenText decided to buy it in 2023. Let's not forget about Turbo Prolog and the time they almost did a Turbo Modula-2, but it was actually published by TopSpeed and now lives in Clarion. Ugh. Borland... Err, Inprise... Err, Embarcadero... Or CodeGear? Or Idera? Who keeps count? Anyway, that switched so many hands it's sad to see. They were doing way too much. A lot of bad decisions made them less and less popular (not like their current greed is helping their case). Oh well. Long live Free Pascal.