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That's right, Brazil, Russia and China still have huge amounts of Delphi developers. To a lesser extent so do South Africa and Australia. Would you believe me

by m0zzie 12y ago

That's right, Brazil, Russia and China still have huge amounts of Delphi developers. To a lesser extent so do South Africa and Australia. Would you believe me if I told you I currently work in a software house whose main suite of desktop products is still in Delphi? We've been using .NET since the mid-2000s (before I started here) for a few of our products, and all new development for desktop products in the past few years has been .NET, but the company's bread and butter and highly successful products are Delphi applications through and through. It's still a capable development tool but the language is showing its age. I very rarely have to touch it any more but when I do I always get mixed emotions of "argh, Delphi sucks ass, I wish it had <insert any .NET language feature here>", and "oh man I forgot how awesome Delphi was, I wish it was this straightforward in .NET!" Comments such as the latter are few and far between, these days.

dguaraglia 12y ago
That's not surprising! Some really good enterprise and POS software got developed in Delphi (and other desktop frameworks/IDEs) back in the day. In Brazil a lot of businesses were starting to adopt POS, and having someone building a billing program for you was all the rage. There's little incentive to update such systems as long as they work. Not everything needs to be a website! (shakes walking stick and shouts to kids to get off his lawn) I remember hating .NET in the beginning. Performance was abysmal and anything mildly low-level took a lot of work. I made some good money as a freelancer writing COM libraries or C++ libraries with a thin C# wrapper so that they could be used by companies that had bought into the whole .NET thing. Then C# introduced generics, and it started breaking away from the similarities to Java. Things improved and in time .NET became a very capable runtime/framework. I'm actually excited to see Microsoft finally opening it up. As much as I love Python, the cloud and all the fancy new stuff we have nowadays, I occasionally long for the good old days when desktop software reigned supreme. OK, better go to sleep now. I'm starting to sound like an old fogy :)
isaacdl 12y ago
My day job is at a software shop that still has ~90% (millions of LOC) of its application suite in VB6!

by m0zzie 12y ago

dguaraglia 12y ago

That's not surprising! Some really good enterprise and POS software got developed in Delphi (and other desktop frameworks/IDEs) back in the day. In Brazil a lot of businesses were starting to adopt POS, and having someone building a billing program for you was all the rage. There's little incentive to update such systems as long as they work. Not everything needs to be a website! (shakes walking stick and shouts to kids to get off his lawn) I remember hating .NET in the beginning. Performance was abysmal and anything mildly low-level took a lot of work. I made some good money as a freelancer writing COM libraries or C++ libraries with a thin C# wrapper so that they could be used by companies that had bought into the whole .NET thing. Then C# introduced generics, and it started breaking away from the similarities to Java. Things improved and in time .NET became a very capable runtime/framework. I'm actually excited to see Microsoft finally opening it up. As much as I love Python, the cloud and all the fancy new stuff we have nowadays, I occasionally long for the good old days when desktop software reigned supreme. OK, better go to sleep now. I'm starting to sound like an old fogy :)

isaacdl 12y ago

My day job is at a software shop that still has ~90% (millions of LOC) of its application suite in VB6!