4 ms·

A lot of the software I really admired in the early 2000s was developed by single persons using Delphi. It seems to me like there is (was?) something promoted b

by kqr 2mo ago

A lot of the software I really admired in the early 2000s was developed by single persons using Delphi. It seems to me like there is (was?) something promoted by a Delphi environment that is rare to find elsewhere, that lets people (a) quickly prototype cool stuff, and then (b) sustainably grow it into a mature product as it gains users. I wish I cared enough to learn it, but there's so much else I need to learn first!

marginalia_nu 2mo ago
Delphi had a powerful and easy to use GUI editor in the early 2000s, much less of a hassle compared to building software with Windows' own C++ API.
- blackhaz 2mo ago
  As a kid I remember I was lost in all that OOP, window handles and stuff, and could never do anything. Delphi was like assembling Lego. Very similar to QtCreator.
  - morkalork 2mo ago
    It was like Visual Basic and Pascal had a baby
    - bdamm 2mo ago
      It was never clear to me who showed up first, but I used Delphi first and then tried Visual Basic and was like "Oh! It's here too!"
      - nottorp 2mo ago
        Well if you were familiar with Delphi the VB magic broke when you tried to make your own components for the designer. I went the same path and it was a bit of a shock when I found out i have to fire up Visual C++ to do a custom VB button.
- ChrisGreenHeur 2mo ago
  I remember borrowing a book that had it on a cd, it already had the GUI editor, this must have been around 1997 or so.
- Narishma 2mo ago
  Mid 90s rather than early 2000s.
- ciupicri 2mo ago
  Yeah, but on the other hand Microsoft also offered Visual Basic which was definitely easier to use. The code wasn't as fast, but it wasn't a snail as MS added a compile option (to p-code if I remember correctly) in version 4.0.
  - yold__ 2mo ago
    Vb 6 got native compilation too
    - pjmlp 2mo ago
      Only to be killed in VB.Net. It took all these years to have what should be in the box on .NET 1.0 instead of NGEN.
      - memsom 2mo ago
        To be honest, VB.Net was a very thin veneer of VB on top of the .Net runtime. It was not good. All of us that were doing Delphi quickly jumped to C#, because it felt a lot more grown up. The only truly terrible products I have worked on after ,Net came on the scene were ones where VB developers decided to use VB.Net to make something "more modern."
- alexott 2mo ago
  Back ~30 years ago, Delphi wasn’t easy compared to Sybase Power++! for example. At that time it was really GUI based efiting
sieve 2mo ago
I noticed this as well in the 2000s. Stuff like WinHex which I was pretty sure then was written using Delphi. Was into RE during those days, so I used to poke around the internals of software just for fun
- coldpie 2mo ago
  Ran into this quite a bit while working on Wine, too. Start digging into a program's behavior to fix some Wine bug and, "oh, huh, it's another Delphi app."
thibaut_barrere 2mo ago
Even before, Turbo Pascal was fairly appreciated in some circles (e.g. demomaking), quite productive and nice to use!
- oblio 2mo ago
  Turbo Pascal was the go to IDE for small commercial apps for quite a few years after its release.
scrapcode 2mo ago
The GUI builder was more powerful than the one provided by VS, from what I remember (20+ years ago since I've dabbled in it). I really miss that era. In certain circles you could open an application and almost get a sense as to who built it due to the craftsmanship / UI / attention to detail in the placement of the elements in the application, etc.
- haspok 2mo ago
  Perhaps a better way to look at it would be to say that Visual Studio had a resource editor UI, basically a frontend to a resource file - that's it. In contrast, Delphi provided you all the UI code by default, so even if you did not write a single line of code, your program ran and displayed a window or dialog with all the UI elements you could interact with. This was a higher level abstraction (one could argue VS did not even have an abstraction - you still had to code your window procedure from scratch. MFC was the first real attempt at simplifying UI code, but you still had to write code...). But it did not stop here: it was trivially easy to add a database "connection" to your app (IIRC it was represented by a UI element that was not actually displayed), just provide the connection parameters, connect it to a complex UI element like a table, and voila - you had a live database view within 5 minutes.
  - Tallain 2mo ago
    Yeah, a lot of non-visual components still require (or want) you to drag-and-drop them in the builder and edit many or most properties there. It's a weird thing to adjust to, and it often leads to a very cluttered view if you have a lot of them. Conversely, a cluttered view with a ton of non-visual components can be a very easy-to-spot signal that you might be trying to do too much in one screen.
  - pjmlp 2mo ago
    Not only has MFC never been at the same level as OWL, unfortunately to this day other than the short lived C++/CX, they never shipped anything comparable to C++ Builder, which shares the RAD tooling with Delphi. Even doing COM in Delphi/C++ Builder feels more ergonomic than any of Microsoft endless C++ frameworks for COM/WinRT.
kevin_thibedeau 2mo ago
I keep a Windows VM for one app that is a commercial Delphi program for embroidery editing. It's been around for 30 years and is on the path to getting cross platform support soon with recent GUI revisions. Always been pretty solid for a product from a small team.
- vkaku 2mo ago
  Do ping the Wine folks to make it run; Chances are you'd need almost very few changes to get it to run. Delphi runtime is quite portable.
Tallain 2mo ago
The RAD environment makes it insanely quick and easy to throw together a reasonably functional desktop app. Think WinForms on steroids. For all its age and the many cracks and seams, it's still very fast, easy for beginners and pros alike, and the final executable is a single tiny file (usually)
- kaiken1987 2mo ago
  I really find it mind blowing nothing else from what I've seen has really replicated it. Qt does an alright job but everything just seems to take 50% more effort to get it do the same.
  - scotty79 2mo ago
    WinForms was a decent successor of Delphi, after that gui lib designers dropped the ball completely and eventually got eaten by React.
- msh 2mo ago
  I am very sad Kylix (the official Delphi for Linux) never went anywhere.
  - pjmlp 2mo ago
    Sadly it was a very lousy port, if I remember correctly instead of properly supporting Linux, they used Wine to make it work, thus it had quite a few issues. Secondly, it was trying to sell developer tools to a community that rather spend one month coding an alternative than pay regardless if it is a Starbucks XL cappuccino they would be losing.
    - nottorp 2mo ago
      > if I remember correctly instead of properly supporting Linux, they used Wine to make it work, thus it had quite a few issues Only the IDE was using wine, the deployed applications were native. But the IDE was a bit annoying because of that. > Secondly, it was trying to sell developer tools to a community that rather spend one month coding an alternative than pay regardless if it is a Starbucks XL cappuccino they would be losing. You forget, it was after Borland renamed itself to Inprise and wasted all their cash on UML diagram software and other enterprise stuff. So it's not a Starbucks XL cappucino, it's more like a truckload of those. Also they sold it separately from Delphi, so you ended up paying twice to do cross platform development. It started at 2 x 1k, i think. So 550 to 600 Starbucks XL cappucinos at 2001 pricing. Besides Starbucks is overpriced, so maybe 900 great coffees from that noname place you accidentally found out about...
ux266478 2mo ago
Delphi is definitely something I'd put up there with LispWorks, a really excellent example of what polished developer experience should optimize for. Even though it's not real live coding like LispWorks, you could see your UI evolve with your classes, without sacrificing drag-and-drop editing, and without having to do it in another language. Everything is seamless, and the libraries are all extremely well thought-out. I think clisp is a nicer language than opascal, but Delphi is still really good software. A relic from an era where commercial toolchains dominated. Tools for serious corpo Engineers born riding the coked-up excesses of... I think conglomerates were capital's darling at the time?
- pjmlp 2mo ago
  Which is why nowadays most commercial developer tools are paywalled SaaS products, or access to walled gardens.
  - anthk 2mo ago
    Lazarus still exists; but SBCL badly needs an CLIM (MCCLIM better) based GUI REPL for the good (Listener and such, a la Smalltalk). Everyone can just use Emacs/Lem and then for GUI needs, the Listener/Debugger/Viewer interface.

by kqr 2mo ago

marginalia_nu 2mo ago

Delphi had a powerful and easy to use GUI editor in the early 2000s, much less of a hassle compared to building software with Windows' own C++ API.

blackhaz 2mo ago
As a kid I remember I was lost in all that OOP, window handles and stuff, and could never do anything. Delphi was like assembling Lego. Very similar to QtCreator.
- morkalork 2mo ago
  It was like Visual Basic and Pascal had a baby
  - bdamm 2mo ago
    It was never clear to me who showed up first, but I used Delphi first and then tried Visual Basic and was like "Oh! It's here too!"
    - nottorp 2mo ago
      Well if you were familiar with Delphi the VB magic broke when you tried to make your own components for the designer. I went the same path and it was a bit of a shock when I found out i have to fire up Visual C++ to do a custom VB button.
ChrisGreenHeur 2mo ago
I remember borrowing a book that had it on a cd, it already had the GUI editor, this must have been around 1997 or so.
Narishma 2mo ago
Mid 90s rather than early 2000s.
ciupicri 2mo ago
Yeah, but on the other hand Microsoft also offered Visual Basic which was definitely easier to use. The code wasn't as fast, but it wasn't a snail as MS added a compile option (to p-code if I remember correctly) in version 4.0.
- yold__ 2mo ago
  Vb 6 got native compilation too
  - pjmlp 2mo ago
    Only to be killed in VB.Net. It took all these years to have what should be in the box on .NET 1.0 instead of NGEN.
    - memsom 2mo ago
      To be honest, VB.Net was a very thin veneer of VB on top of the .Net runtime. It was not good. All of us that were doing Delphi quickly jumped to C#, because it felt a lot more grown up. The only truly terrible products I have worked on after ,Net came on the scene were ones where VB developers decided to use VB.Net to make something "more modern."
alexott 2mo ago
Back ~30 years ago, Delphi wasn’t easy compared to Sybase Power++! for example. At that time it was really GUI based efiting

sieve 2mo ago

I noticed this as well in the 2000s. Stuff like WinHex which I was pretty sure then was written using Delphi. Was into RE during those days, so I used to poke around the internals of software just for fun

coldpie 2mo ago
Ran into this quite a bit while working on Wine, too. Start digging into a program's behavior to fix some Wine bug and, "oh, huh, it's another Delphi app."

thibaut_barrere 2mo ago

Even before, Turbo Pascal was fairly appreciated in some circles (e.g. demomaking), quite productive and nice to use!

oblio 2mo ago
Turbo Pascal was the go to IDE for small commercial apps for quite a few years after its release.

scrapcode 2mo ago

The GUI builder was more powerful than the one provided by VS, from what I remember (20+ years ago since I've dabbled in it). I really miss that era. In certain circles you could open an application and almost get a sense as to who built it due to the craftsmanship / UI / attention to detail in the placement of the elements in the application, etc.

haspok 2mo ago
Perhaps a better way to look at it would be to say that Visual Studio had a resource editor UI, basically a frontend to a resource file - that's it. In contrast, Delphi provided you all the UI code by default, so even if you did not write a single line of code, your program ran and displayed a window or dialog with all the UI elements you could interact with. This was a higher level abstraction (one could argue VS did not even have an abstraction - you still had to code your window procedure from scratch. MFC was the first real attempt at simplifying UI code, but you still had to write code...). But it did not stop here: it was trivially easy to add a database "connection" to your app (IIRC it was represented by a UI element that was not actually displayed), just provide the connection parameters, connect it to a complex UI element like a table, and voila - you had a live database view within 5 minutes.
- Tallain 2mo ago
  Yeah, a lot of non-visual components still require (or want) you to drag-and-drop them in the builder and edit many or most properties there. It's a weird thing to adjust to, and it often leads to a very cluttered view if you have a lot of them. Conversely, a cluttered view with a ton of non-visual components can be a very easy-to-spot signal that you might be trying to do too much in one screen.
- pjmlp 2mo ago
  Not only has MFC never been at the same level as OWL, unfortunately to this day other than the short lived C++/CX, they never shipped anything comparable to C++ Builder, which shares the RAD tooling with Delphi. Even doing COM in Delphi/C++ Builder feels more ergonomic than any of Microsoft endless C++ frameworks for COM/WinRT.

kevin_thibedeau 2mo ago

I keep a Windows VM for one app that is a commercial Delphi program for embroidery editing. It's been around for 30 years and is on the path to getting cross platform support soon with recent GUI revisions. Always been pretty solid for a product from a small team.

vkaku 2mo ago
Do ping the Wine folks to make it run; Chances are you'd need almost very few changes to get it to run. Delphi runtime is quite portable.

Tallain 2mo ago

The RAD environment makes it insanely quick and easy to throw together a reasonably functional desktop app. Think WinForms on steroids. For all its age and the many cracks and seams, it's still very fast, easy for beginners and pros alike, and the final executable is a single tiny file (usually)

kaiken1987 2mo ago
I really find it mind blowing nothing else from what I've seen has really replicated it. Qt does an alright job but everything just seems to take 50% more effort to get it do the same.
- scotty79 2mo ago
  WinForms was a decent successor of Delphi, after that gui lib designers dropped the ball completely and eventually got eaten by React.
msh 2mo ago
I am very sad Kylix (the official Delphi for Linux) never went anywhere.
- pjmlp 2mo ago
  Sadly it was a very lousy port, if I remember correctly instead of properly supporting Linux, they used Wine to make it work, thus it had quite a few issues. Secondly, it was trying to sell developer tools to a community that rather spend one month coding an alternative than pay regardless if it is a Starbucks XL cappuccino they would be losing.
  - nottorp 2mo ago
    > if I remember correctly instead of properly supporting Linux, they used Wine to make it work, thus it had quite a few issues Only the IDE was using wine, the deployed applications were native. But the IDE was a bit annoying because of that. > Secondly, it was trying to sell developer tools to a community that rather spend one month coding an alternative than pay regardless if it is a Starbucks XL cappuccino they would be losing. You forget, it was after Borland renamed itself to Inprise and wasted all their cash on UML diagram software and other enterprise stuff. So it's not a Starbucks XL cappucino, it's more like a truckload of those. Also they sold it separately from Delphi, so you ended up paying twice to do cross platform development. It started at 2 x 1k, i think. So 550 to 600 Starbucks XL cappucinos at 2001 pricing. Besides Starbucks is overpriced, so maybe 900 great coffees from that noname place you accidentally found out about...

ux266478 2mo ago

Delphi is definitely something I'd put up there with LispWorks, a really excellent example of what polished developer experience should optimize for. Even though it's not real live coding like LispWorks, you could see your UI evolve with your classes, without sacrificing drag-and-drop editing, and without having to do it in another language. Everything is seamless, and the libraries are all extremely well thought-out. I think clisp is a nicer language than opascal, but Delphi is still really good software. A relic from an era where commercial toolchains dominated. Tools for serious corpo Engineers born riding the coked-up excesses of... I think conglomerates were capital's darling at the time?

pjmlp 2mo ago
Which is why nowadays most commercial developer tools are paywalled SaaS products, or access to walled gardens.
- anthk 2mo ago
  Lazarus still exists; but SBCL badly needs an CLIM (MCCLIM better) based GUI REPL for the good (Listener and such, a la Smalltalk). Everyone can just use Emacs/Lem and then for GUI needs, the Listener/Debugger/Viewer interface.