Posts by Mason Wheeler 6 publicly visible posts • joined 12 May 2010
>It is the only language where you can get raw speed combined with object orientation.
You've obviously never used Delphi. (Which also offers a syntax that mere mortals can understand.)
>It also has the best generics solution of any language.
Excuse me? C++ templates have got to be the worst generics solution ever invented. Take a code-generation scheme that, by definition, has to be evaluated to completion by the compiler, and make it Turing-complete? Yes, what a wonderful idea!
Paul: Nope. The Delphi development team is currently doing some very interesting research into parallel execution as a language feature, and there are at least two very nice open-source parallel libraries written by community members.
I'm not sure where the perception of Delphi as outdated or not suited to modern programming tasks comes from, but it's just not true at all.
>Who uses Delphi or Pascal in the real world?
Plenty of people, actually. Delphi is currently #9 on the TIOBE index, and it sees a lot of use in the real world. What it doesn't get a lot of is publicity. It's such a productivity booster, even compared with "more modern" languages, that a lot of companies treat it as a competitive advantage and they keep real quiet about it so their competitors don't pick up on it.
>I don't think I'd agree with the comment that C doesn't know what a file is. AFAIK, C treats everything as a file.
I should have clarified. The C *compiler* doesn't know what a file is. It knows includes and "translation units," but it has no concept of source code files as modules.
(It also doesn't know the difference between a number and a boolean, but that's a completely different flaw.)
I'm glad to see them choosing a selection of languages that actually makes sense. All the people out there saying that teaching Delphi will produce unemployable graduates... how does that work? People write new apps in whatever language they can find programmers for. (How else do you explain Java? Sun marketed it aggressively to all the universities, they started turning out huge waves of Java coders, and since it's what the grads know, it's what they end up using.)
Besides, I never had any trouble getting a job as a Delphi coder. I'm making good money at it right now. And if more Delphi coders leads to more apps being written in it, that's good for everybody. It's a good language that makes writing good code easier. Plenty of good programs, even top-of-their-class programs, are written in it, with Skype being one of the most visible examples. What actually gets written (and published and used) in C#?
Most real programs these days seem to be written in Delphi or C++, and the less C++ production code out there, the less glitchy crap I'll have to put up with. And the less .NET production code out there, the less slow, bloated crap I'll have to put up with. So I'm all for it.
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