Posts by jaypete

Delphi RAD tool (remember that?) gets support for Linux desktop apps – again

Re: "many developers such as myself who are not writing off-the-shelf apps "

Yeah, I eventually settled on WPF. It was a headache, but more powerful. And it seems like MS was stealthily abandoning WinForms. Oh, and I left out UWP, their other aborted framework (which targetted desktop and phone/surface).

As long as I've been a programmer, MS has been in a transition of some sort. That's their modus operandi. They were google before their was google - "Hey, check out my great new framework that will solve everything? What, that old stuff? No, we're done with that." Next year, same story, different framework. The best thing about Delphi was skipping almost all of that. You just stuck with the VCL, for year after year. Stability is way more conducive to good programs than The Hot New Thing.

C# as a language isn't so bad. I think it's probably the best landing place for an ex-Delphi coder. Which isn't surprising, considering it was designed by the head designer of Object Pascal. And there's plenty of stuff in it I wish was in Delphi (especialy since I still have to spend most my time in Delphi 2007). C syntax is gross, and Pascal is the best, but I'm flexible enough that I got over that.

TeamB could be such a mixed bag, though. Some of them were fantastic. But some of them (unfortunately, the most prolific) were utter assholes. Sadly, these seem to be the ones that have made the transition to Stack Overflow as the dominant voices in the Delphi topic...

Re: Builder6 apps still run fine ...

We still have a very large program written in Delphi 2007 that runs just peachy. Okay, not peachy but that's because it's spaghetti code by this point with all the features that' have been bolted on it. But it's not the fault of Delphi but of the codebase. And it's the reason it hasn't been ported to any later version, when they made the Great String Shift. Just too much work and no funding available to do the proper thing and re-implement it. And yes, it's stuck in 32bit but that's not really been much of an issue as plenty of the client's other apps are as well.

Delphi developers are some of the people who hate Delphi the most (we deal with its problems daily). But we're also realistic about it. Even for its flaws, it has some major benefits. Skipping out on DLL hell and .Net growing pains have been a huge productivity booster.

Re: write their own web server in Delphi....

There is something better out there! Give the chromium embedded browser components a look-see. Might be what you want.

Re: "many developers such as myself who are not writing off-the-shelf apps "

Delphi has had a messy history and plenty of missteps, but this comment is full of mistakes.

Starting with one of the most important ones first: 'The Pro only allows for local databases. You need the Enterprise to target RDBMS - even the "lower end" ones, as if only the larger companies still run them.'

This is categorically wrong. How do I know this? I've been using Delphi Pro to do MSSQL work for two decades. Typically, the Enterprise ones contain some proprietary DB connection components, but we've never used them. The ODBC, OLE DB and native SQL drivers have always been just fine for us, combined with the ADO components. I'm sure you don't love one or more parts of that, but it's definitely not true that you need anything but Pro. And if you did want to use the free edition, there are plenty of 3rd-party database components that will let you connect to whatever you want.

As far as them not changing SKUs in forever: again, you could not be more wrong. They changed SKUs back and forth left and right - too much, in my opinion. They were always trying new things. Their problem has always been that the number of users has done nothing but remain stable(ish) or gown down. They can't really offer a lower price and stay in business, because even if they priced their best product at $100, they'd never get enough users.

As far as Architect containing tools that change every year, that's definitely an exaggeration. Yes, they do change, but their main competition left is MS, and they're the king of flighty software. When I went to make the switch for new projects to Visual Studio/C#, I found that complete disarray of MS when it came to WinForms or WPF and Entity Framework, LINQ, and ADO.Net. It's just about impossible to even get MS to tell you which thing THEY want you to use and won't abandon next. Even before this round, we've all went through that with numerous MS Flavor of the Years. Yet we used Delphi and more or less ignored that. Delphi was way more reliable when it came to shifting technologies.

Finally, slightly pedantic, but you keep saying "Embarcadero." That makes me really not trust any of your observations. Embarcadero is a company that existed for 15 years before they bought CodeGear (then owners of Delphi) in 2008. And CodeGear was just a division of Borland that was spun off in 2006. Almost the entirety of Delphi not managing to keep its market share is on Borland's shoulders. So when you say "Embarcadero did this" or "Embarcadero did that", it makes me raise and eyebrow and question your credibility. It's like saying "Google created the first major video sharing platform" because Google later bought YouTube. Just doesn't make sense.