Posts by vintagedave 6 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Sep 2015
I haven't read the book in question: what is the significance of the AI producing the phrase "the weight of the world at war"? Googling does not show an exact instance of that phrase other than this same article.
Are they using it to try to show the AI was trained on the book content, rather than on content about the book?
> it took a lot longer than 2 minutes to feed in the 15 or so floppies it came on.
For sure. I think I was lucky enough to install from the CD, even on Windows 3.1. I recall installing Windows itself from many floppies though.
In the video on twitter, I install via the CD ISO, virtualised to a CD drive in the VM.
> really we should have used windows 3.11 for the screen grabs
I posted a video of installing Delphi and writing a new app on Windows 3.11 a couple of days ago, which you might enjoy: https://twitter.com/cpp_delphi_dave/status/1227574959712690177
It's very short, less than two minutes long.
Alcade, I was going by TIOBE's numbers there, which show Pascal + Delphi at approximately #6. I'm sure it is much lower on github and similar places compared to an open-source language with a big open-source community, for several reasons: Delphi is not open source, the vast majority of code written with it is not open source, and many Delphi developers who are in large organisations may be slower moving to something like git than older source control systems. I know of active Delphi libraries still hosted on SourceForge, for example.
It seems to me that you aren't considering things like that. I don't worship it like a religion, but I do try to take a reasonable balanced view. One of Delphi's problems is the internet community of people who seem viciously against it, posting at every opportunity that it is bad, unused, etc. For something unused, it sure has a lot of interested critics. Personally, I wish those people would not comment unless they had something useful to say.
As for Google, Facebook etc: I have no idea if those companies use it. I know even Microsoft uses products built with Delphi - that's different to them using it in-house, of course. I also know, from personal knowledge, that Delphi is used by several space institutes, by many scientific software companies doing things you may not have heard of but with core, high-tech customers, etc. (I know because I've worked on several of those software products.)
I doubt there will be price reductions for Delphi, but remember that AppMethod - budget Delphi - is free to cheap depending on what you buy. (A small monthly subscription.)
Delphi is much more widely used that many people think - I have heard reasonable estimates, which I believe, that it's about on par with Python. TIOBE's latest index puts the combined Delphi + Pascal at #6. The combination of the two is because TIOBE differentiates between Pascal and Delphi for some reason known only to themselves (no-one uses Pascal, ie procedural 1980s code, now. On the other hand places like github often mark code as Pascal when it is Delphi, eg if it is a library with no UI code.)
Some of the comments here are a bit misleading, mostly on price. That's for the top-of-the-line "Architect" edition. Normal Pro versions are, for a brand new license with all languages and platforms, less than half that. And if you only want one language - C++ Builder, for example - it's a third. And then if you are a hobbyist programmer or a small dev team, there's AppMethod, which is the cheaper edition, priced very nicely, as a per-month subscription of $25.
The Architect edition is comparable to Visual Studio, which is 5500 pounds for their top edition! So, especially given you can use it for $25 / month, I'm not sure complaints about price are really justified.
Another comment was about the controls being "mimicked". The commenter failed to mention the most important bit - that you can in fact use platform native controls if you wish. Some are inbuilt, and others are available as third-party open source components.
What this means is that you design a UI and then in platform-specific descendants - you can create variations of the one form or UI for various devices or classes of devices or platforms or whatever, it's quite neat - you can specialise to specify that on, say, iOS the edit box is a native edit box, on Windows it's a native edit, etc. Or, if the inbuilt controls (which are skinned to match the OS they're running on, yes) are good enough for you, you can leave it at the default and just use them.
Also, someone asked if Delphi is still being used - absolutely. I moved my consulting company over to using Delphi almost entirely a while ago, because demand was rising. Most of that seems to be in the cross-platform areas - most clients I see seem to really like writing an app once and then just varying the UI to make it correct per platform or device.
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