[HN Gopher] 26 Years of Delphi
___________________________________________________________________
26 Years of Delphi
Author : mustafabisic1
Score : 179 points
Date : 2021-02-15 11:41 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blogs.embarcadero.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blogs.embarcadero.com)
| Narishma wrote:
| Is it me or do those Windows 3.1 screenshots look much more
| readable than the modern ones?
| bbkane wrote:
| You might like SerenityOS. It's a hobbyist OS with a similar
| aesthetic and the authors seem to have a lot of fun making it.
|
| https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity
| simion314 wrote:
| I did not used Delphi but did a a few Windows apps with C# and
| Windows Forms int he past, I am curious in the present day for
| Windows only dev what would be the advantage of using Delphi over
| C# with VS or Intellij.
| marcocantu wrote:
| Delphi produces native applications with no dependency, offers
| components encapsulating Windows APIs, COM, WinRT -- and a
| great native platform experience. Binary code with no
| dependency = real xcopy deployment, small deployment, memory
| and CPU efficiency. It's like writing in VC++ in terms of
| power, but visual and high level in terms of dev experience
| simion314 wrote:
| Thanks for response, I agree with parts of your response but
| I do not understand what you mean with "components
| encapsulating Windows APIs, COM, WinRT" in comparison with
| .Net , I mean .Net also wraps the majority of the win32 and
| other APIs.
| candiodari wrote:
| Yes but the resulting .exe depends on like 20 installed
| .dlls. For starters, the .NET runtime, which will
| fundamentally limit where your app runs.
|
| Second updates in those underlying dlls and runtimes may
| prevent your app from working correctly.
|
| So if the customer doesn't have or screws up their .NET
| installation, your app stops running. Getting a Delphi app
| to stop running on windows through bad sysadminning ... I
| haven't seen it done.
|
| Think of C# apps like java .jar applications. They end in
| .exe, but they're not, not really. And at least .jar makes
| it a lot clearer it needs a JRE to run, and it's cross
| platform to boot.
| simion314 wrote:
| Your reply is not what I asked.
|
| I know the issues with the .Net dependency, like user has
| 4.0 but the app depends on 4.5 or similar problems. But
| this is not a big issue and you can if you want bundle
| the Java or .Net runtime inside the application.
|
| Anyway I was aware of this binary size / memory usage
| difference in favor of unmanaged code, my question was
| something else, if you can clarify that or admit it was
| an error would be great.
| johnx123-up wrote:
| FWIW, https://groups.google.com/g/borland.public.delphi.non-
| techni... List of cool applications written in Delphi (long
| thread, 2006)
| albertzeyer wrote:
| In any discussion about Delphi, you really should also mention
| Lazarus (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/). It's more mature (i.e.
| more cross platform) than Delphi, and fully open source. It's
| based on the Free Pascal Compiler (FPC)
| (https://www.freepascal.org/) (also open source).
| gramie wrote:
| "It's more mature"
|
| Usually that implies that bugs and rough patches have been
| ironed out. I would have to say that Delphi is _far_ more
| polished than Lazarus.
|
| Not that I'm complaining about Lazarus, it's an amazing
| accomplishment and I play around with it every now and then to
| see how far it's come.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Well... in a perfect universe where bad decisions are never
| made, sure. But a few years after the turn of the century
| someone at Borland/Inprise/CodeGear/whatever decided to
| rewrite the IDE while chasing .NET when under a company that
| by that time had completely lost any interest in development
| tools.
|
| I've only tried the trial/free Delphi versions sporadically
| and TBH 'polished' isn't something i'd use to describe them.
| Then again neither is something i'd use to describe Lazarus
| (which i'm using much more often), however that is for
| completely different reasons.
| FpUser wrote:
| It is more cross platform but integrated debugger kind of
| sucks. I am doing some project for Raspberry Pi 4 and had to
| resort to debugPrint() as on some breakpoints it reports gdb
| error and terminates debugging.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Indeed, i always have issues with gdb and Lazarus (under
| Windows) with the debugger randomly deciding to stop working
| or not stepping through code (even with zero optimizations)
| or other stuff.
|
| However the new debugger written specifically for Free Pascal
| seems to work much better - just not available everywhere
| ATM.
| justin66 wrote:
| Has anyone published a good comparison of the two compilers
| building the same project? It'd be interesting to know how
| compile times compare.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| The original Delphi compiler which was in use until some
| versions ago (and might still be available, dunno) was much
| faster than Free Pascal while producing more or less the same
| quality code (in terms of performance) but could only target
| Windows. Free Pascal targets a bunch of other CPUs and OSes
| though.
|
| I haven't tried any of the recent versions, but AFAIK they're
| based on LLVM so i'd expect compilation times to have went up
| but produced executables to be a bit faster.
|
| FWIW Free Pascal's developers have mentioned at the past that
| fast compiler performance isn't really something that they
| care much about (though in practice FPC is among the faster
| compilers, just not as fast as Delphi used to be).
| dver wrote:
| Another year and another Delphi post.
|
| Started with Delphi 2, the productivity benefits vs VB were
| amazing. Plus managing code and having a usable object based
| language.
|
| I went from nothing to a PLC(programmable logic controller) to
| database manufacturing floor delivery system in 3 weeks for my
| first app. Amazing productivity.
|
| Cut to now, I have a custom MES/ERP app written in D7 I still
| support or for 3 sites. 20 years old.
|
| Every couple of weeks I have to boot up the VM and do a few
| things.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| As a solo developer, the price of a new license is kind of crazy
| to keep upgrading. Otherwise would continue to develop in it.
| Loved delphi, hated the paradox database that came with it.
| mdip wrote:
| Oh man, I learned to code in Pascal writing a BBS in the 90s.
|
| Back in the 90s, I had the option of taking a BASIC or Pascal
| course over at the High School next door to my middle school; I
| opted for the latter, and started studying C shortly thereafter
| but wrote almost everything in Turbo, later Borland Pascal and
| ultimately did a few Delphi projects. I think I had to save up
| for a _year_ to buy a _really real_ license for the development
| environment (12 years old on a $5 /wk allowance with $10/lawn mow
| ... it took a while). Gotta say, I kind of miss it. Wonder if
| they ever updated the old `crt` pascal library; I believe it's
| purpose was to simply allow basic terminal text
| coloring/features, its name was always a little odd. Folks,
| today, might not make the connection at all. :)
| flaie wrote:
| I remember when I discovered Delphi, it was in circa 2001-2002.
|
| At the time I was 16-17 and knew how to program with PHP (I was
| modding phpBB at the time), tried with PHP-GTK to build user
| interfaces, but found it not that great.
|
| Then I discovered Delphi, already knew some parts of Pascal. But
| what a gem it was, in a matter of days I felt like I was totally
| proficient, could create windows, manage resize, add components,
| tweak colors, run background tasks, want a listview? just drag
| it. Need a HTTP call? drag the component (can't remember the
| name), connect onclick to it, and you're done. I recall the
| website torry.net with plenty of libraries to download.
|
| I also tried Borland C++, but wasn't good enough with it, and as
| I remember discovering that even DevC++ was written with Delphi.
| Simply figuring out it was good enough for me.
|
| I created so much things with it until like 2004-2005 I think,
| like a complete terminal on my Windows, re implementing standard
| commands all within Delphi. Wrote some games companion for
| Rainbow Six and RavenShield [1], fetching statistics and
| available servers, scanning games to find your friends,
| downloaded thousand times. An alt-tab which worked with Quake III
| that at the time was also downloaded hundreds of times, a
| companion to The All Seeing Eye (server browsing), a small
| Photoshop tool where I learnt how to create my own filters like
| Gaussian blurs and so on [2], key mapping profiles for plenty of
| games by modifying INI files [3], a code formatter inside DevC++
| [4], ...
|
| I have lost all of my source code (didn't knew how to backup
| things at the time), still have some binaries and screenshots for
| posterity
|
| I remember this period with nostalgia and great passion.
|
| Thank you Delphi for the good times and all the fun, this is when
| I really knew what I wanted to do after school.
|
| [1]
| https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160435-948cd7...
| [2]
| https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160351-cc03e0...
| [3]
| https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160401-712b1f...
| [4]
| https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160338-6f856c...
| &&
| https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160330-cc512a...
| captainmuon wrote:
| Unfortunately, I've never used Delphi. But the article makes me
| nostalgic for the old school Borland style GUIs with icons on the
| buttons and stippled backgrounds. Or the CTL3D style which was
| really modern at the end of the Win 3.1 era.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Compared to developing an application for the web those Borland
| interfaces were wicked fast and pretty clever. Extremely
| productive.
| soenkeliebau wrote:
| This article made me feel really, really old!
| kwanbix wrote:
| Sadly it was killed by so many bad decisions from Borland. It was
| really a great tool.
|
| Maybe if Microsoft had bought it instead of "just hiring" Anders
| Hejlsberg?
| barrkel wrote:
| Anti-trust. In fact Microsoft invested in Borland as part of a
| settlement for predatory hiring, IIRC.
| nottorp wrote:
| 26 years ago Delphi was pretty affordable and you didn't need a
| lawyer to protect yourself from the licensor too :)
| midrus wrote:
| Great memories.
|
| Delphi was my first programming language. I learned it from
| programming magazines I used to buy when I was about 17 years old
| or so.
|
| My dad had a small supermarket at that time, and I remember the
| first useful program I built in my life was a small application
| to scan discount coupons he used to accept. Those coupons had a
| barcode and I discovered the hand scanners we used were just
| doing keyboard emulation. So I wrote an application in Delphi
| that would allow my father to scan all coupons at the end of the
| day and then print a sheet with a table of quantities, amounts,
| subtotals and totals of the money he had in coupons... something
| he was doing by hand before this. He was so happy with this
| program.
|
| The program itself was very, very, very shitty, but it worked
| well for him. For example, at that point I didn't even knew that
| arrays existed, so all the logic and multiplication was done
| manually, like label43 = textInput25 * textInput24 * 0.1.
|
| I also remember that, in order to send the form to the printer, I
| wrote code to go control by control, change the background to
| white, the border to black, calling something like
| form.printForm() and then restoring all the colors. This caused a
| horrible flickering when printing... but hey... it worked!!
|
| The best memories I have was that probably, this was the first
| time I had that "feeling" of having built something useful to
| somebody. And certainly the best moment was when one of his
| suppliers who also accepted those coupons asked us for a copy of
| the program. Great times.
|
| Some days I feel like I've never have built something as useful
| again since then .
| neverartful wrote:
| Kudos to you for making things work when it was all brand new
| to you. You demonstrated a lot of creativity and ingenuity!
| bm98 wrote:
| >The best memories I have was that probably, this was the first
| time I had that "feeling" of having built something useful to
| somebody. And certainly the best moment was when one of his
| suppliers who also accepted those coupons asked us for a copy
| of the program. Great times.
|
| And then you go off to college, and one day the program stops
| working because of one problem or another, and they call you in
| the middle of studying for final exams, and that's when you
| learned about technical support and technical debt and all the
| things that make programming less fun!
|
| Some people have recurring dreams in which they show up to
| school or work in their pajamas... my recurring dream is that
| some program I wrote in high school is still being used twenty
| years later, and they come calling because something broke...
| ivanhoe wrote:
| And one day you learn about charging yearly support fees, and
| that makes your dreams of someone using your app for 20+
| years much more pleasant...
| mdip wrote:
| You and I sound like we had very similar childhoods . . .
|
| I wrote a tool that managed a bunch of information related to
| the AP Computer Science exam[0] which my High School
| continued to use for 10 years after I graduated. I had
| received a call on it once, five years after I graduated,
| from a guy filling in for the teacher I wrote it for and I
| ended up working with one of _his_ students to figure it out
| ... while at the Atlanta airport, traveling for work. :)
|
| [0] I don't recall the details, but it was a surprisingly
| involved text-based pascal program.
| curiousllama wrote:
| I'm gonna be honest, if I'm just sitting in the airport
| with not much to do, this sounds like fun. No pressure,
| just taking a call and debugging an old script, with a
| chance to give a kid a good story/learning experience...
|
| "C'mon kid, I had it working for 5 years and you broke it?
| What'd you do!" :)
| mdip wrote:
| Oh, man, the only thing better would have been if one of
| my colleagues was there with me... I was _very_ young in
| this job (19, first real job, next youngest was 26).
| Waiting on my bags, traveling for business as a 19-year
| old kid and fielding support calls for software I wrote
| on the side. Even without any witnesses, it felt pretty
| damn awesome. I remember the incident very well because
| the flip side was that I was scheduled to work at the
| switch site in Downtown, which meant I was staying at a
| _really_ nice hotel and besides the software issue, I had
| a much more pressing problem of Northwest Airlines[0]
| having managed to lose my bags on a direct flight and I
| had failed to pack the usual emergency items in my carry-
| on[1].
|
| [0] Yup, it was that long ago.
|
| [1] Someone told me "they don't lose bags on a direct
| flight". _Very_ wrong. Lost them on the way back, too --
| same fscking trip. But Detroit opened a new terminal and
| was having a "holiday baggage handling crisis"; after a
| few weeks they compensated me and sometime the following
| summer my bag appeared on my front porch. The "crisis"
| only affected international flights, so I wonder if my
| luggage had a better trip than I did. It was seriously
| more than 6 months lost.
| cwbrandsma wrote:
| I have had nightmares about stuff like this. I get called in to
| update an in house program, start looking at the code and
| exclaim "wtf is this? Who wrote this?"...and then enters a
| sheepish looking 17 year old. Now I have to back track "hold up
| there...is this your first program? Really? Good job".
| bluedino wrote:
| Try when it's a 44 year old and he's been there twenty years,
| leaving his fingerprints on every process
|
| "We have to listen to Dave, he built this place! We can't
| replace his code!"
| Ma8ee wrote:
| Or when you complain about some really horrible legacy code
| and then it comes up that is written by your new tech lead
| just a few months ago.
| CRConrad wrote:
| Or, worse: By yourself a few years ago.
| artificial wrote:
| "....aaah this was my early functional phase."
| bluedino wrote:
| To be fair to Dave: he knows all the edge cases, he just
| isn't the right person to be writing code.
| zuzun wrote:
| Oh, this brought back memories of the first useful Delphi
| program I wrote, back when I was a teenager:
|
| The basketball club of our city held an online popularity
| contest, where the winner would receive free tickets or
| something. My friend desperately wanted to win this
| competition, so I wrote a Delphi program that would record the
| mouse clicks it took to perform a single vote and then repeat
| them forever. All of our peers received a copy of the program
| and in a coordinated attack, we opened the site in our
| browsers, taught the program to vote and left it running until
| my friend rose to first place. Sadly, he ultimately lost the
| competition, because another fan was better at forging votes.
| He surpassed us with ease. I guess he just hammered the server
| with HTTP POST requests, something I had no clue of at the
| time. In the end, the number of votes on the first and second
| place were laughably off the charts.
|
| Years later, when we were adults, my friend became friends with
| the owner of the club, who invited us to a game. There, my
| friend introduced me by telling him this story, which I had
| completely forgotten. The owner had a good laugh, but I think I
| blushed a little.
| pantulis wrote:
| This is a wonderful story in many angles !
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > Some days I feel like I've never have built something as
| useful again since then
|
| Oh I am so familiar with this feeling. I recently found a
| program I wrote at my last job on a flash drive. It came from a
| chance conversation with one of the scientists I worked with.
|
| After listening to her lament the many hours of manually
| parsing log files it took for her team to generate reports, I
| wrote a short program one day (with a few updates over the
| following weeks) to do it for them. Some days I feel that the
| code I wrote that one slow afternoon was the most useful thing
| I've done in terms of ROI. A couple hours of fun text
| manipulation and voila: a bunch of Very Happy People (tm) and
| untold hundreds of hours of time saved.
| tsss wrote:
| I feel like back then I could appreciate the usefulness of my
| work a lot more. Even a very simple program was like magic
| and I got my feeling of accomplishment. Nowadays it's all
| about best practices, getting stars on Github or writing
| influential blog posts to further my career. By surrounding
| myself with other successful people, the bar has become a lot
| higher than in my childhood days where most peers could
| barely even turn on a computer. I have realized that writing
| a software to do X is most of the time trivial; getting tests
| to pass is only the very first step. But writing software in
| a _good way_ (whatever that means) is the hard part and the
| worst thing is that there is no clear indicator if you are
| even improving. It used to be the program either works or it
| doesn't. But values like maintainability and scalability are
| intangible and a perfectionist like me is compelled to work
| themselves to death in pursuit of an unclear goal. In many
| cases I don't even care if the program works as long as the
| code is beautiful, like a mathematician who spends all his
| time working out elegant proofs with zero applicability
| whatsoever. It doesn't help that I have to waste my talent on
| pointless CRUD and yet another e-commerce system, which only
| serves to sell people things they don't need and make the
| rich even richer.
| nocubicles wrote:
| I am using Pascal like language daily at work. Its modern version
| of Pascal powering modern ERP ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/dynamics365/business-centra... )
|
| I have background in Javascript, Golang, Typescript and all other
| modern web technologies but I have to say I enjoy working with it
| and its very highly productive for me.
| speransky wrote:
| That was amazing times when with Delphi you can build an app with
| database which automates some tasks and sell it to local
| business. Easy money. Lawyers, libraries, trade businesses, even
| gas station !
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Back in Windows 3.1 if you have a 44,373 KB free RAM then it was
| really a lot. Anyone still using Delphi for large-scale new
| projects? I'm pretty sure there are a bunch of legacy ones around
| the corner but what about new ones?
| dsparkman wrote:
| Delphi, ah the memories. I use to make a fair amount of money in
| the late 90s making shareware applications with Delphi. It was
| the most productive I have ever been as a developer. But, the
| world moved to web fairly rapidly, so I had to move on to the
| web.
| statictype wrote:
| What were your apps?
| bluedino wrote:
| I loved Pascal and I did most of my DOS programming with it until
| DJGPP.
|
| But for Windows in jumped right to Visual C++. All because Delphi
| was "dying", at least in popularity. So I never got to give it a
| chance.
| yarone wrote:
| Tried Delphi a million years ago. Was too in love with Visual
| Basic 3.0. Couldn't do it.
| xony wrote:
| embarcadero , wondering why they couldn't retain the original
| name borland? .. it was a nice platform , cant afford
| subscription model so moved on to open source technologies.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Nice memories, I keep trying to find Delphi soul in Java and
| .NET.
| elvis70 wrote:
| I remember using Delphi 1 on a 386 under Windows 3.1 and watching
| and even listening to the GUI reloading from the swap file
| component by component. I had enough RAM but I think the Windows
| memory manager was not great. Today, I'd throw the PC out the
| window, but at the time, there was something reassuring about it.
| But maybe I'm embellishing my memories.
| flrizzato wrote:
| Doing backend apps with Delphi is very fun and productive!
| raynr wrote:
| Delphi 2 was my introduction to programming. It was on a pirate
| CD-ROM together with many other programs - Office, C++ Builder,
| Visual Studio. Once I discovered it (because of course I'd play
| with all the programs on the pirate CD), I was amazed.
|
| At the time I didn't know of an easier way to draw windows and
| buttons and stuff, and have them do what you expect them to do
| (Visual Basic? Pfft, edgy, tweenage me scoffed at the idea of
| compiling pseudocode that had to be interpreted at runtime. And
| don't tell tweenage me about MFC, past me would never have
| admitted that using the MS foundation classes in C++ was too
| difficult for my dumb brain. I also didn't "get" C++ so couldn't
| get on with Borland's C++ builder. But object pascal... object
| pascal was structured and easy to understand and compiled to
| machine code in an eyeblink so was therefore superior to
| everything else!!! Man, what a butt I was...)
|
| First program I wrote and released was a game editor. Someone had
| reverse engineered a certain video game's file and data structure
| and documented the offsets and sizes of all the stats of the
| entities in the game. I used that information and slapped a
| shitty GUI with comboboxes and dropdown lists and number fields
| (with no bounds checking I think), together with some very dodgy
| file read/write code I part copied from some geocities page and
| part copied from some reference book code, and I made my first
| game editor. People actually used it! Man, that felt cool.
|
| Man, what a butt I was, I was the very definition of an "I am a
| programmer" meme.
|
| Later on that information made its way into a UGE module so my
| program was no longer relevant.
|
| I remember borrowing Delphi reference books from the library and,
| not having enough computer time, hand writing my code to learn.
|
| Good times. I didn't know Delphi was still in use, I am obviously
| not in the development line anymore. 26 years! I feel old!
| nunb wrote:
| Oh the joys of tweenage discovery! For me it was writing
| programs in dbase+ and lotus123 ... much later I did MFC and a
| precursor whose name escapes me now... what a programming dead
| end that was!
| alexott wrote:
| Power++ was much easier to use - it was really hiding a lot of
| internal things, so you worked with handlers only, etc. no need
| to look into class declarations, etc.
| https://www.drdobbs.com/powersofts-power-20/184415592
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| One of my competitors used Delphi to write their software. One
| part of the software ran under the print spooler so when 64-bit
| Windows came along they were stuffed as the 64-bit version of
| Delphi was slow to arrive. I did quite well out of that.
| r0b05 wrote:
| Out here in the battlegrounds of web development, this article
| makes me miss the safe cocoon of Delphi and Windows development.
| Lukesys wrote:
| Delphi was amazing in the Borland days, not so much after then!
| pdfernhout wrote:
| I liked Delphi when I used it a bunch in the mid-to late 1990s
| (mainly Delphi 2.0).
|
| Three years ago, I ported a Delphi application called StoryHarp
| from back then in my spare time to TypeScript/Mithril+Tachyons.
| https://github.com/pdfernhout/storyharp-js
|
| Years earlier, I had made a parsing tool I wrote years ago to
| help with some of that -- which I have not made publicly
| available because I am not sure about the copyright status of the
| grammar files I started from. Some random notes on the conversion
| process which involved a lot of hand conversions:
| https://github.com/pdfernhout/storyharp-js/blob/master/conve...
|
| Before and after the automated conversion:
| https://github.com/pdfernhout/storyharp-js/tree/master/conve...
|
| But given the way Delphi type declarations are similar to
| TypeScript type declarations (designed by the same person), and
| you need to make some major changes to redo the UI in Mithril,
| doing the entire thing by hand (and with the help of some regexes
| to replace stuff) might not have been that much harder?
|
| Still have a couple of other applications from those years I want
| to covert to TypeScript someday (a garden simulator called Garden
| With Insight and a 3D botanical plant design tool called
| PlantStudio).
|
| That said, Delphi is still a great language -- even if I perhaps
| regret using it overall instead of just sticking with Smalltalk,
| which was harder then to deliver an application with. We had also
| been using C++ at one point before that too, and Delphi was a lot
| easier to work with than C++ in the 1990s -- even if I'd guess
| dealing with C++ code nowadays might be easier overall with
| improved standard libraries, memory leak tools, and faster
| computers? My wife who was working on the projects with me then
| also knew Pascal well from academic projects, so Delphi was also
| easier for her than C++. However, same as me, she liked Smalltalk
| better. If we had know then that something like Squeak would come
| along eventually, we might have stuck with Smalltalk over Delphi.
|
| I also have a music-related Java Android app I'd like to port to
| TypeScript, so it is not just Delphi. I just would like having
| some past major projects in a widely-supported language I'm using
| now for other things and which runs easily in the browser.
| BruceEel wrote:
| Delphi! Purchased ver.3.0 back in the day, it was excellent.
|
| So, who's using Delphi in prod anno 2021?
| dejv wrote:
| I am not writing Delphi code anymore (but did that for close to
| 20 years professionally), but there are many artifacts still up
| and running and would probably run for next few decades if not
| longer.
|
| 1) I've started my programming career by creating new user
| interface for device that measures properties of metal joins on
| [BIG] machines [1]. It is used by many mining and energy
| companies. First version of this device was created somewhere
| in 70s so I guess this new one will last for many decades to
| come.
|
| 2) There was a time when every company created its own ERP
| software and I was hired to help maintain 500k lines of code
| monster that is used by fair chunk of construction companies in
| Austria. All the accounting, warehouse, quoting, payroll and
| what not was based on top of old Paradox database. Custom hacks
| were deployed to make sure we fit everything into 64kb of index
| space and I've got massive headaches trying to make work
| decades old database in networking mode. Another fun year was
| at the time when Vista changed memory layout and you sometimes
| crash everything because of memory location that was meant to
| be for printers is now occupied by sound stuff and you've
| touched protected memory. Anyway as far as I know this system
| is up and running, counting numbers, printing invoices, work
| orders and quotes all days long.
|
| [1]
| https://www.popsci.com/resizer/meUXbu78Po3bGHtIFIaRTwBsLqg=/...
| rubidium wrote:
| We've got a 20 year Delphi code base for a robotic product that
| we need to update the functionality and simplify the UI. If I
| could have 2 Delphi devs to take on this project I'd be
| delighted. We'll probably just use a .net cover though.
| wdb wrote:
| Sure, happy to work on it. Last day rate was $1200/day
| mobilio wrote:
| I've using TurboPascal from 1990 till 2010. Still love it!
|
| Willing to help. Drop me mail to peter at mobiliodevelopment
| dot com
| DelphiABall wrote:
| There are a lot of companies using Delphi in some very cool
| apps. There has been a lot of them published recently on the
| updated blog site at Embarcadero.
|
| https://blogs.embarcadero.com/category/showcase/
| pjmlp wrote:
| Not in prod, but I do occasionally use the community version.
| mhd wrote:
| Yeah, Idera, tell me how great Delphi was before you friggin'
| ruined it, like everything you touch.
|
| Anyway, we've recently had "FoxPro" guest-star here, and Delphi
| definitely was one that took its lunch money. Decent small-
| business relational databases appeared, and people were eager to
| marry it with fancy GUIs -- maybe even with that new-fangled 32
| bit Windows Microsoft was promising. Visual Basic was what
| Microsoft offered. But for many, the language felt a bit awkward,
| as did the programming paradigm. I'm leaning a bit out of the
| meaphorical window here, but there's an argument to be made that
| VB was closer to 4GLs than "conventional" programming languages.
|
| Delphi just really hit a sweet spot. A fast Pascal compiler was
| to be expected from them, the OO features were available in
| previous Turbo Pascal versions, too. But all very nicely
| integrated into a truly RAD IDE -- if what you wanted to develop
| rapidly was a CRUD Windows app.
|
| Still one of the best experiences doing that. I'd have done more
| if for a while my corporate masters didn't demand Java/Swing or
| sacrificing goats (MFC).
|
| And then mobile devices finally ruined every chance of ever
| getting a decent desktop GUI again.
| TheJimMcKeeth wrote:
| Curious how you feel Idera ruined Delphi? Is it the
| introduction of a free Community Edition with all the features
| of Professional including mobile platform support? Or maybe the
| all new Linux compiler?
|
| Sounds like you haven't looked at Delphi in a while. It is
| better than ever in my opinion.
| gaze wrote:
| Look at the amount of Delphi code being written as a fraction
| of all new code being written, today and 20 years ago, and
| tell me how the Delphi community hasn't been ruined.
| gramie wrote:
| Maybe it's laying off devoted long-time staff and hiring
| cheap contractors. The amount of institutional memory they
| lost is astounding.
| dvdkon wrote:
| I don't think Delphi has been "ruined", but I think its
| heyday has definitely passed, because it wasn't flexible
| enough when the prices of tooling plummeted over the last 20
| or so years. It's nice that there's a reasonable free option
| for the platform, but that would have been a big deal some 15
| years back. Nowadays even Microsoft's .NET is open source and
| so are their new libraries. Proprietary IDEs are still alive
| and well, but the popular ones have open-source platforms
| underneath.
|
| I'm not saying Delphi should go full FLOSS. The company seems
| to be doing well enough and not everyone needs to chase
| maximum adoption. I just wanted to express the reasons I see
| for not even considering Delphi for any greenfield projects.
| rob74 wrote:
| Yup... when Embarcadero bought Delphi from Borland in 2010,
| the pricing scheme and lack of a "community version" made
| it clear that they were considering it a "cash cow" and
| weren't putting a priority on expanding its market share.
| Providing a free version _now_ is a bit late. Delphi is
| still unmatched if you want to quickly build a GUI
| application, but the Delphi language itself feels a bit too
| dated to attract new developers - and I 'm saying this as
| someone who has used Delphi in my "day job" for ~ ten years
| and as a hobby for even longer, but around 2010 I kinda
| drifted away from it. Now, if someone would take the GUI
| designer of Lazarus and pair it with, say, the Go language
| (which, although it's not obvious, has a lot of Pascal-
| family DNA in it, and badly lacks a good GUI story), that
| might be an interesting proposition...
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > Now, if someone would take the GUI designer of Lazarus
| and pair it with, say, the Go language (which, although
| it's not obvious, has a lot of Pascal-family DNA in it,
| and badly lacks a good GUI story), that might be an
| interesting proposition...
|
| Uh, garbage collector aside, Go has less features as a
| language than even Delphi 1, let alone Free Pascal which
| runs circles around it.
| thijsvandien wrote:
| Personally, I think the tooling is a much bigger issue
| than the language.
| thijsvandien wrote:
| How about some full disclosure here? Spreading that opinion
| is a main part of your job (Developer Advocate at
| Embarcadero/Idera).
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| It is entirely possible for something to be "ruined", and
| then open sourced as a last resort when the ship has long
| sailed for that being a useful tactic.
|
| So while I haven't followed the ecosystem since Turbo Pascal
| for DOS (when I wrote a Battletech simulator over summer in
| college and had the entire runtime API committed to memory
| aside from pie graphs)..
|
| My impression of it over the years is that it was closed
| source for way too long as whoever owned Delphi tried to ride
| its legacy paying customers as they dwindled to nothingness,
| and then open sourced it.
|
| I have the same vague impression of smalltalk as well, but I
| never programmed in it.
| imagine99 wrote:
| Oh, I can answer that one: By purposefully ruining - and
| continuing to ruin - a great community of developers around
| Delphi.
|
| I apologize in advance for what will be a salty (but
| truthful, I hope) statement, and it was invited, so I would
| like to give it in the hope that it might be heard by someone
| who can do something about it.
|
| You, Idera, just can't get it into your heads that the
| success of a programming language is measured in how many
| people are using it, learning it, messing around with it. Not
| how many Enterprise customers you have that you have locked
| into buying upgrades.
|
| There are statements out there (even from veteran Delphi
| people I really respect) who seriously argue that "we can't
| put out a free version of Delphi because it will be abused".
| I can barely respond to that in friendly words, I'll only say
| that's total madness. Even purveyors of software orders of
| magnitude more expensive than Delphi (architecture and 3D
| modelling come to mind, even some movie and music producers)
| have understood that if you make it available at no charge to
| students and young people, to groups who just don't have the
| money, they will be the ones that will buy it at full price
| as soon as they have the chance.
|
| It happened to me. I think I can admit it here, as many have:
| My first steps into programming where with a copy of Delphi
| on an unmarked CD decades ago. It was a rush, a high like
| I've never experienced again. Truly my first love. And when I
| later got some job responsibility, I actually got a purchase
| order through for a Delphi Architect edition (the most
| expensive SKU). But these times are long gone and are
| unlikely to repeat because today's students don't have the
| Delphi community anymore that I had to teach me.
|
| But Delphi's current (and previous) owners just don't get
| that. To them, Delphi seems to be something "elite",
| something only people paying thousands of bucks should get
| access to. Taking free money from a few legacy firms, who's
| going to say not to that?
|
| No, you will not extract a couple thousand bucks from a small
| student programmer. No, you will not get programmers in
| poorer countries to buy your software at these prices. You
| will especially not stop bigger organizations or people who
| truly want to abuse it. If they need it, they will pirate it,
| just like they do with Adobe, Microsoft etc. Don't think
| you're better and cleverer than those guys. The joke is
| probably (I suspect) that pirated versions are still easier
| to install than getting the dated 12-months community edition
| of Delphi with all its nagging.
|
| One could probably find an argument where it would be fair to
| pay good money for new Delphi versions every now and then.
| But you don't put nearly enough effort in improving the IDE
| (the object inspector is still horrible to use if you're
| doing UI-heavy work - there is e.g. still no "favorites"
| tab), you still don't support PNG and JPG across the board or
| make it possible to play an MP4 file in the mediaplayer
| component. No transparent TEdit, TMemo, a lot of new
| component implementations are half-hearted at best. The list
| of little buggy, annoying things that are unchanged for 20
| years is endless. You just don't care.
|
| The only one you hurt with this, Idera, is yourself and the
| community (and by that, again, yourself). The Delphi
| community was one of the most vibrant and multi-faceted in
| the world. Thousands of components for anything you could
| possibly imagine. Great forums and message boards that put
| StackExchange to shame. All that was literally choked off
| because Embarcadero wanted to make an extra buck. It was not
| because of Python or Java. Those just filled a void you
| purposefully created.
|
| And now Delphi 10.4 has been out for almost 10 months and you
| still haven't been able to publish a free community edition
| for it, still insisting on rubbing it in everybody's face
| that you consider community edition users to be barely legal
| freeloaders who can do just well with an old and buggy
| edition (which e.g. still doesn't support the new Chromium
| Edge browser component afaik).
|
| So, shame on you Idera/Embarcadero. And, frankly, shame on
| the old Delphi guys supporting this behavior and not taking a
| stand for a great language and a great community and for not
| forcing Idera to do things differently. You guys still have a
| voice, still have name recognition in the community, use it
| to talk sense and reason, effect change!
|
| I for one still think, like several others here, that Delphi
| even today remains unsurpassed in several aspects (especially
| in the rapid development of UI and Windows-heavy apps). But
| that's thanks to a lack of great alternatives, not thanks to
| Idera's innovation, that's for sure. So don't pat yourself on
| the back.
|
| All is not lost but we'd have to see a major offensive in
| terms of openness from Delphi's current owners. It sure would
| be awesome to make Delphi just half as great as it once was.
| But why not start small: Put the Community Edition on the
| same release cycle as the paid versions. Update the UI a bit
| with some irresistible great features. Then fix bugs and
| innovate, go into schools and invest, invest, invest in
| community. It might just pay off...
| mengibar10 wrote:
| 1988 was the year I started using Pascal while still in college.
| I developed and released a general ledger software for small
| accounting firms in 1989 using it. Sold 20 copies, bought myself
| a printer. It was a great experience that I could never duplicate
| to this day. It became better with Delphi release, so easy to
| develop UI using those drag and drop widgets.
| mikewarot wrote:
| I started in Turbo Pascal, and migrated to Delphi when it came
| along, it was cheap enough that I had the pro version up until I
| moved into SysAdmin. Now that I want to dive back into production
| programming, Delphi has basically priced itself out of existence
| for me.
|
| Lazarus is a good alternative, a bit buggy, but at least I can
| afford it. Eventually I'll probably implement a Pascal layer on
| top of Racket.
|
| As far as straight up GUI toolkits go, there's no better tool
| than Delphi. I doubt I'll ever have something that powerful
| again.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| May I suggest windows presentation framework? It is very
| different in thought to Delphi but it would be my candidate for
| most powerful GUI toolkit, even more than Delphi.
|
| With the obvious proviso that for most the time of the Desktop
| computer has passed, so the most powerful GUI framework might
| be Vue or React at this point.
| e12e wrote:
| > Eventually I'll probably implement a Pascal layer on top of
| Racket.
|
| https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal
| mobilio wrote:
| Mine first TP was version 5.0 or 5.5. I still love how fast was
| IDE then.
|
| When TP (or BP) was released i was still love old versions
| because they can compile to RAM, while new one only can compile
| to disk.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Whatever happened to Power Builder?
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| Ah, I remember being in middle school and buying a huge book
| seeming to be 6 inches thick with a copy of Delphi 1.0. This was
| what started it for me. The really cool thing was that in Delphi,
| you could often import Visual Basic components. Me and my friend
| would look for components that other VB programs would use and
| try to use them in our own projects. GUI creation is second to
| none with Delphi/Lazarus and I love the event based system, but
| nowadays I find writing in Pascal a little...not fun.
| Gehinnn wrote:
| I remember when I turned 16 and all I wanted as birthday present
| was a license for Delphi 2009. If I remember correctly, it costed
| more than EUR1k at that time. Obviously I got something else.
|
| When I learned about the free Visual Studio Express, I switched
| to .Net development and never used Delphi again.
|
| This experience shaped me and all tools I will ever create will
| be available for free to students and kids.
| rahoulb wrote:
| Thats because Microsoft hired Anders Hjeilsberg, architect of
| Delphi, to create the .net platform and the C# language. And in
| the process signing the death warrant for Borland (who created
| Delphi).
|
| The rumour was Microsoft's own staff preferred using Delphi to
| their own tools, which is why they hired Hjeilsberg.
| andi999 wrote:
| Borland killed itself by switching to services.
| Gehinnn wrote:
| The killing feature was not .Net for me, but the free and
| fully featured IDE. I hated to type out every public
| declaration twice in the Delphi 5 IDE I got from school.
|
| I remember that I hated the startup time of Visual Studio
| though. In Delphi 5, I typed invalid syntax to create a
| temporary bookmark: When I pressed F5 to compile the project,
| I _immediately_ jumped to it. This was entirely impossible
| for C# programs.
| pjmlp wrote:
| First of all, Anders was hired to create J++.
|
| Secondly, he only joined after been asked multiple times by
| ex-Borland colleges when he felt it wasn't his place any
| longer at Borland.
|
| https://youtu.be/0g-IjyFnrAM
| martin_a wrote:
| I think I've posted it before, but I'll repeat myself
| nevertheless: Delphi was my first contact with programming.
|
| I was probably 13 or 14 years old and had no idea what I was
| doing, but I could resize the windows, add items to lists, change
| the color of Strings and place buttons and stuff like this.
|
| So, _obviously_ I needed the Delphi 6 Enterprise edition which a
| friend had (pirated of course) and gave it to me on one of those
| really cheap CD-R with that distinctive plastic smell.
|
| One of the first "real programs" we wrote was something to read
| sensor data via the parallel port. It was for a school project
| where a belt had to move and then stop, once the light barrier
| would sense something. We killed lots of parallel ports in doing
| that, because we just didn't knew how to do it.
|
| Didn't really write anything more useful at that time, but it
| showed me that there's a world behind what we see and know as
| "programs". Maybe it laid some fundations in my brain, who knows.
|
| Every time I see Delphi pop up I think I should probably have a
| look at it. But I'm a web monkey now. Lost for everything good,
| but I like to think back of the 14 year old me. Better times.
| nezirus wrote:
| My experience was very similar to yours, playing around with
| components and forms on Delphi 3; But in addition to that I've
| managed to learn some assembly with Delphi (asm blocks), go
| figure.
|
| And the speed of the compiler on my venerable Pentium MMX
| 166MHz!!! (Sad looks towards my Rust build on a 100x more
| powerful computer :-( )
| FpUser wrote:
| >"... But I'm a web monkey now."
|
| For the most part I was spared of this fate. I do everything
| from firmware to enterprise applications. Delphi/Lazarus are
| still both in my toolset for Windows and Raspberry Pi GUI based
| projects. Most of the time it is C++ based servers though.
|
| I was entertaining QT at some point but it feels like a legal
| minefield with all their licensing shenanigans to me.
| myth2018 wrote:
| +1 here.
|
| I already had a background on electronics and, lucky me, I
| burnt no parallel ports.
|
| When I joined the university I met a guy who built amateur
| solid motor rockets and I designed and built a prototype
| atmospheric probe for it. It measured temperature and
| barometric pressure only, and a program in Delphi 7 downloaded
| the data from a PIC mcu via parallel port, displayed them in a
| grid and stored them in a Paradox table (by then, I didn't know
| there was a difference between databases and tables and
| couldn't understand all that excitement some of my colleagues
| felt about Oracle, MSSQL and alikes. "They are mere files to
| store tabular data", I used to think).
|
| By then, that was the most complex project I had built, and I
| can still feel the proud and the happiness so vividly. I was so
| ignorant about so many things that it didn't even occurr to me
| to look for information on the internet. And, anyway, it seems
| that the modus operandi by the time wasn't that -- nowadays we
| go right into the internet to look for the most suitable lib to
| the task.
|
| I just got the data sheets, the docs and examples installed
| along Delphi, and found my way through.
|
| It wasn't productive, but those were definitely good times.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Yeah, it was my introduction to programming too, but I was six
| or seven at the time.
| binwiederhier wrote:
| This could have been written by me. I loved Delphi and learned
| how to write software using Delphi 5. We got a cheap copy from
| school so I didn't have to pirate it. I still have that
| printout of the class hierarchy of the standard library and the
| CD ROM.
|
| I loved Delphi and I'll be forever grateful for the lessons
| I've learned.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| My beginnings were Turbo Pascal and Delphi. I guess I got
| spoiled because I never found an IDE where GUI design was do
| intuitive and easy afterwards
| andi999 wrote:
| Yes. I do not understand why GUI designing is not getting
| better.
| jamesdhutton wrote:
| When it first came out, Delphi was streets ahead of the main
| Microsoft options available at the time, namely VB and Visual
| C++. I remember it with great affection.
| [deleted]
| ruph123 wrote:
| Whenever I heard "Delphi", I thought it was an ancient
| programming language that older colleagues used to mention ("...
| <anecdote> ... many moons ago, back when I used to program
| Delphi.").
|
| But so Delphi really is/was a GUI editor? Something like an
| ancient Qt Creator? And according to Wikipedia it is not even a
| language but is using "Object Pascal". Wild.
|
| I wonder why this never comes up when I read a out cross platform
| GUI frameworks...
| jonp888 wrote:
| The lack of any free or hobbyist-priced editions when everybody
| else was giving away their tooling for free more or less killed
| it off.
|
| It is still beloved by it's acolytes and there are a handful
| people out there who learned Delphi 20 years ago and stubbornly
| refuse to use anything else. It's an uphill struggle though
| because no-one releases a Delphi SDK for anything anymore.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Just curious why don't they do that now? Like a community
| edition. I guess that's because there are still some licensed
| editions out there and they are OK with the $$ they bring in.
| But what about the future?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| They do do that:
| https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-
| dow...
|
| It's just way, way late to the party, so most guests left
| :(
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Oh that's so sad. Personally I never used Pascal/Delphi
| because I was barred from using a computer (because my
| father thought I'd just play games instead of learning
| anything useful) until late into the 90s and I was not in
| a CS major, but my father used it extensively as he
| worked as Math-turned-CS professor in a University and
| Pascal was pretty popular at the time.
|
| I also read the book about Borland vs Microsoft and kind
| of feeling sorry that Pascal/Delphi didn't make it.
|
| Just a question, say I wanna develop a 2d map editor for
| Windows 10, does Delphi win over C# in the sense of RAD?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| So as someone who's spent the majority of my programming
| career using Delphi, it's sadly a bit difficult to give a
| resounding yes to that.
|
| I do think that for small programs and utilities Delphi
| is hard to beat.
|
| But C# has become a much more capable and feature rich
| language, the RAD story isn't terrible for smaller
| projects (no experience on larger), and you'll have a
| significantly larger community in the .Net camp. This
| means more libraries, as well as more articles and people
| to ask.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Try Lazarus / Free Pascal, it is essentially a free and
| open source Delphi (really, it has even similar API and
| some companies who release middleware for Delphi also
| release it for Lazarus) without the bloat and with
| support for multiple platforms using each platform's
| native controls (Delphi also added support for multiple
| platforms in recent years but it uses some custom mobile-
| styled widget set that looks alien everywhere). Under
| Linux you can even choose between Qt and Gtk.
|
| As for your question, here is a video i made ~5 years ago
| making a simple 2D tilemap editor under Windows - starts
| from installing Lazarus (as well as a small image editor
| i wrote in VB5 :-P) to making the editor:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3JgeIUo1X0
|
| Also as a bonus here is another video where i make a
| swapping tile puzzle game (this time under Linux, also
| includes installing FPC from repository and building
| Lazarus from source code which IMO is the best way to
| install it under Linux as to avoid issues common with
| packaging):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_01Xhd2EJM
|
| Note these aren't tutorials (they do not even have
| sound), just screencasts. I thought about buying some mic
| and making some tutorials but i do not think my voice
| sounds that good :-P
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Hah! That looks cool man, and exactly what I want to work
| on. Back then I only know C++ and didn't use any library,
| so I used SDL and directly blit some "buttons" onto the
| screen. Pretty ugly as I had to work out a simple GUI
| framework by myself, all those callback things.
| FpUser wrote:
| Delphi is a complete IDE. The language is called Object Pascal
| but can be informally referred to as Delphi language.
|
| The language itself is far from being ancient and it supports
| very practical and modern set of features.
|
| The IDE is expensive but there is a Lazarus (basically open
| source version of Delphi). It is somewhat less polished but is
| still very nice.
|
| If you search for this exact phrase "cross platform GUI
| frameworks" there are more then enough links mentioning
| Delphi/Lazarus. They're of course only usable within their
| respective environments. Not universal like QT.
| ruph123 wrote:
| I think there goes my weekend, Lazarus looks... interesting!
| Joeri wrote:
| Delphi was something that doesn't really exist anymore, the
| blending of IDE, programming language and toolkit into a single
| product. You programmed in Object Pascal, using the VCL toolkit
| (component suite), and because that was the only thing the IDE
| needed to support, it was tightly wrapped around those two
| things. The visual designer was the glue between the pieces.
|
| The result of compiling a delphi project was a native windows
| executable that used the core win32 API's underneath (the VCL
| was implemented over bare windows api's). Compiling was blazing
| fast (seconds), and the executables that came out of it were
| blazing fast as well (C++ level performance). This contrasted
| heavily with visual basic, whose apps required a slow
| interpreter library, which made them cumbersome to install and
| run.
| andi999 wrote:
| Yes, it is basically Qt Creator, but much much faster and
| problem free.
| kdtop wrote:
| I have a love-hate relationship with Delphi/Pascal. Love the
| language and what I can do with it. Hate the buggy IDE. Love that
| fpc is n open-source pascal compiler. Hate the the Lazarus IDE
| was difficult to use (when I last tried it a few years ago). Sad
| that so many comments talk about pascal in the past tense.
| u678u wrote:
| BTW from memory Delphi was named as such as it was the main route
| to Oracle which was the most common enterprise database.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi
| jacquesm wrote:
| I still occasionally come across Delphi in use today, and even
| new projects are started using it as the core technology. It
| definitely wouldn't be my choice but it is interesting to see how
| productive people can be with this even now.
| Pelic4n wrote:
| Delphi is as old as Python, damn.
| ivanhoe wrote:
| Delphi had, by far, the best documentation that I've ever
| encountered. Every Win API method was documented, explained and
| illustrated with an example. Delphi 4 manual was so much easier
| to follow than Microsoft's own Win16/32 API help in VS C++ (which
| I actually used more back then).
| jhbadger wrote:
| A lot of this was good, reminding us that the world of 1995 when
| Delphi was first released was quite different from now. But the
| idea that "The video games industry was in its early days" in
| 1995 is a bit of a weird assertion. So the 8-bit and 16-bit eras
| didn't count?
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Yeah that line also hit me as a bit weird. Even when we count
| the PC game industry it was pretty mature at that time already.
| kristaps wrote:
| > When Delphi was released in 1005
|
| Lovely typo, although it undeniably feels as if Delphi has been
| around forever.
| marcocantu wrote:
| Ops, fixed, yes somehow funny
| statictype wrote:
| Delphi was great. I remember downloading it (pirated obviously)
| over a 14k connection. It took like a day.
|
| The killer feature was that it could build stand lone executables
| with no runtime.
|
| On one hand I really miss those days. On the other hand, what we
| have today is far superior. Its a great time to be alive for a
| kid who wants to learn how to program.
| kwanbix wrote:
| For desktop? I am not sure what we have is superior. Unless you
| count, which was designed by the same guy who did Delphi.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| From my perspective, the modern web is mostly a regression:
| subscriptions or advertising everywhere, frustrating tools for
| building UIs, etc.
| npalm wrote:
| We still maintain our flagship software in Delphi. We were on
| Delphi 6 until a year ago we jumped to modern Delphi. We were
| surprised to learn that the Delphi installer was quite broken and
| the 1 year license doesn't include install help after the first
| month! Needless to say, we promptly started migrating our code to
| something else.
| kolinko wrote:
| Ah delphi, earned some of my first money as a student doing two
| awesome projects in Delphi that worked for the next 10 years...
|
| I still haven't found anything with such a good interface builder
| (Xcode comes close, but it's still worse imho)
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| The C# WinForms UI builder is a nice ripoff of the Delphi UI
| builder.
| msh wrote:
| Its not really a ripoff as C# and Delphi is designed by the
| same person.
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