[HN Gopher] Awesome Pascal - A curated list of Delphi, FreePasca...
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Awesome Pascal - A curated list of Delphi, FreePascal, and Pascal
shiny things
Author : rsecora
Score : 112 points
Date : 2022-03-24 14:23 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| nanochad wrote:
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I would advise against anyone learning Pascal, any more.
|
| I wish I had instead learned C and C++.
|
| The tooling around Pascal was phenomenal, with Turbo Pascal,
| Borland Pascal, and Delphi. But the tooling around C++ is just as
| good or better now, in my opinion.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I would advise against anyone learning C/C++, any more.
|
| I wish I had instead learned Go and Rust.
|
| The tooling around C++ was phenomenal, with Turbo C++, Borland
| C++, and C++ Builder. But the tooling around Rust is just as
| good or better now, in my opinion.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I wish I had instead learned Go and Rust.
|
| >
|
| > The tooling around C++ was phenomenal, with Turbo C++,
| Borland C++, and C++ Builder. But the tooling around Rust is
| just as good or better now, in my opinion.
|
| I know you say it's just your opinion, but that's an
| extraordinary claim, don't you think?
| VikingCoder wrote:
| The tooling around Go and Rust is just as good or better?
| Really? That's a claim you're making?
|
| Walk me through which AAA games are developed in Go and Rust,
| just as a conversation starter.
| FpUser wrote:
| I know and use both. I use Delphi for desktop GUI applications
| and C++ for backend servers. Works like a charm. I use other
| languages / frameworks as well. Trying to stick to a single
| tool / tech is possible but not very wise.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Learning languages is awesome, and I highly advise it. But
| there's just no point in learning Pascal, as a first
| language, not any more.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| How come that the word "awesome" hasn't been autoremoved from the
| title? It was an awesome bug that showed up in many previous
| "awesome x" submissions.
| lokl wrote:
| Any Delphi experts know of openings for remote devs from Ukraine
| (now in Germany)? Sorry if inappropriate to ask here, hope it's
| understood given the circumstances.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is good, I have a tip for you. Doing a DM.
| lokl wrote:
| Thanks, appreciate it. Asking for a friend with 10+ years
| Delphi and MS SQL. Focus on warehouse management software for
| supermarkets, business analytics.
| smurum wrote:
| eatonphil wrote:
| HeidiSQL is one of the most prominent real world applications in
| Delphi I know of. It's been hard to find many others. Most likely
| they exist at many companies in private.
| jug wrote:
| Total Commander!
| Joeri wrote:
| Plenty of enterprise software as well. I used to work on this
| product, the windows desktop part of which is 3 million lines
| of delphi.
|
| https://spacewell.com/brands/mcs-iwms/
| bloblaw wrote:
| https://jonlennartaasenden.wordpress.com/2014/11/06/famous-s...
|
| A couple more well known titles are: -
| BeyondCompare - InnoSetup - Nero Burning ROM
| - Macromedia Dreamweaver!
| criddell wrote:
| ResophNotes does as well:
|
| https://resoph.com/ResophNotes/Welcome.html
| superdisk wrote:
| FL Studio and CheatEngine as well.
| 0des wrote:
| Delphi also had a place in video game dev at the time. I
| remember a thick thick thick book at Border's all about
| Delphi game dev, and once they stopped ordering new
| O'Reilly books I eventually read that too.
| mobilio wrote:
| Also Macromedia HomeSite and first release of Skype.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I want delphi to die. Not that I don't like the language or the
| IDE, quite on the contrary: it is pleasing to use. I want it to
| die because it remained "too closed" for "too long". Updating
| from one version to a future version was nightmare, depending on
| a single vendor is dangerous, the way they ignored multi-platform
| for decades was bad, historic prices left many hobbyists out of
| the game, no consensus, no committee, no public consultancy on
| how the tools and language should evolve, the complete ignorance
| of how FLOSS tools evolved along around the same period and now
| most languages and used IDE's are at least partially FLOSS makes
| me want to see delphi die.
|
| Make the effort to use or promote lazarus.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Nice list but i think that some of those entries should use
| [Lazarus] instead of [FPC] since unlike Delphi (which is a single
| product), Lazarus and FPC are two different projects and not
| everything that would work on Lazarus would also work on FPC by
| itself. As an example, a project that uses FPGUI instead of
| Lazarus would not be able to use any of the GUI controls marked
| as "FPC".
| aljgz wrote:
| I'm grateful that Pascal was the first language I learned, for an
| unexpected reason:
|
| I was a natural fan boy. We just assume that the thing we
| happened to land on is for some reason the best. Pascal is the
| best, Windows is the best, my country is the best, etc, etc. I
| know people who lived like that their entire (up to this point)
| life.
|
| If I happened to start with c++ or java, I could stay ignorant
| forever. I was lucky that Pascal's ecosystem was so limited that
| I needed to learn c++ and from there I went to java, c#, python,
| and a little bit of others.
|
| Now, when looking back at Pascal, I have the deep nostalgic
| emotion, but I know that for most things I can do with it, there
| are much better tools out there.
| Joeri wrote:
| You should try going back and taking all you have learned and
| applying it to modern pascal. You may find it a much more
| productive language than you remember.
| marcodiego wrote:
| > I was a natural fan boy. We just assume that the thing we
| happened to land on is for some reason the best. Pascal is the
| best, Windows is the best, my country is the best, etc, etc.
|
| Although I've had previous contacts with computers, my first
| personal computer was a windows box in the beginning of the
| second half of the 90's. Never had in my mind "windows is
| best".
| 0des wrote:
| I can identify with this comment a lot. It wasn't that it was
| great or any type of special technology, it's the memories of
| all the fun, struggles, and improvement it helped us find along
| the way.
| StillBored wrote:
| I've used a lot of languages both in hobby projects and
| professionally. I learned pascal in high school when I took the
| majority of what a lot of computer science departments teach in
| their first/second year of college. This is after learning C in
| middle school (this was late 80's early 90's) under the
| direction of my math teacher who thought I should learn
| something besides BASIC/assembly.
|
| So, that said, looking back and trying to teach the current
| generation basic programming concepts beyond
| variables/loops/etc, aka data structures. I repeatedly think
| that my high school data structures/etc teachers did a far
| better job than the current crop trying to wedge more advanced
| computer science topics into languages like Java, python, C++
| or even C. The replacements (Rust) are bad or worse for
| teaching these concepts because the language just simply gets
| in the way to much. C is maybe the best of the allowed choices
| because its possible to write say linked lists, or linked tree
| structures fairly easy but its got so many foot guns that
| Pascal manages to avoid. Languages like C++ might be
| reasonable, until some prof dictates that the class should be
| using std::unique_ptr() or whatever, which just adds confusion
| to something that should at its heart be fairly simple.
|
| So in the end, I think Niklaus Wirth actually has a bit of an
| masterpiece in Pascal when it comes to creating a language for
| teaching computer science topics.
|
| The fact that I also convinced the place I worked to use Delphi
| on a couple of greenfield projects in the mid 1990's and that
| was probably some of the most productive work I've ever done
| shows that pascal also works just fine in a commercial setting.
| 0des wrote:
| Just because it had a cool name, I downloaded Lazarus from my
| OS's package repos. I was kind of excited that the language it
| uses was freepascal. That weekend, for fun, I refactored a few of
| the apps I had built recently to try other methodologies, and it
| was a blast from the past. As a kid, pascal was a very different
| experience, and by the time I mowed enough lawns to afford
| Delphi, everyone had moved to C++.
|
| It hasn't been completely smooth. Doing more modern tasks like
| HTTP requests are not included, and adding the plugin for it is a
| little fiddly, but for your basic GUI tasks, it is actually
| pretty fun, and simple on a level reminiscent of Visual Basic.
|
| I encourage everyone to give it a try, and though you might not
| make your name writing pascal software in 2022, its fun like
| driving a car with a stickshift, or using hand tools to build a
| table. It is an experience worth enduring to experience the
| appreciation and perspective it provides.
|
| Try it!
| lelanthran wrote:
| > and though you might not make your name writing pascal
| software in 2022
|
| You can certainly make money with it. People still pay for
| native-code software after all.
|
| Pretend you want to write a ... oh, I dunno, let's say Task
| tracker, collaboration tool, or order-entry, or some other
| office productivity tool, consisting of only a few forms.
|
| Sure, you can make a web-based UI, and there's many advantages
| to doing so, or you could make it a native application, and
| there's many advantages there too.
|
| I've used the Lazarus IDE to make a small productivity
| application, and it was by far much easier than to make a web-
| based GUI.
|
| It was also instant startup, never used more than around 30MB
| of RAM and ran insanely fast compared to the web-based "native"
| applications we have now.
| musicale wrote:
| > I've used the Lazarus IDE to make a small productivity
| application, and it was by far much easier than to make a
| web-based GUI.
|
| > It was also instant startup, never used more than around
| 30MB of RAM and ran insanely fast compared to the web-based
| "native" applications we have now.
|
| Silly things like ease of development, lower resource usage,
| and responsiveness/execution speed are unimportant to real
| Electron developers.
|
| There are only three things that matter:
|
| 1. Sharing code between the web app and desktop "app"
|
| 2. Easy integration with web-based backend services
|
| 3. Being able to tell management that you use Electron
|
| Microsoft Teams is a perfect example. The backend is so slow,
| buggy, and frequently down that any time spent improving or
| optimizing the client app is not going to provide any
| meaningful benefit. In fact it might have the perverse effect
| of raising user expectations and decreasing overall
| satisfaction with the product.
| d33 wrote:
| Among Pascal projects I'd recommend, check out Hedgewars:
|
| https://hedgewars.org/
|
| It's a Worms clone that actually gave me as much joy as the
| original. What's quite interesting is that the game is written in
| many languages - I heard that e.g. AI is written in Haskell.
| wdb wrote:
| Makes me wonder if Torry's Delphi Pages still exists :)
| [deleted]
| dave84 wrote:
| I looked up http://www.delphiforfun.org which I visited
| regularly in my teens and early 20s and I noticed that it
| stopped updating in 2018. After a bit of googling I sadly found
| the obituary for Gary Darby, the site's creator. He maintained
| that site until he was 79! I hope it will be preserved. RIP and
| thanks for the code.
| kogus wrote:
| I just searched for it, and it appears to be quite active. Walk
| down memory lane.
| CRConrad wrote:
| Active? Has looked like a patient with lots of hoses and
| sensor wires in every orifice -- i.e, on terminal life
| support -- for the last decade or so to me.
| CRConrad wrote:
| I look in on it every year or so (maybe every other, recently),
| whenever I get curious. A mere shadow of its former self when
| it comes to number of uploads per week, but still there and
| fighting on.
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(page generated 2022-03-24 23:01 UTC)