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Comment by binarynate | Hacker News Reader

For context, Anders is the creator of C# and TypeScript:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg

Interesting - never heard of him, that I can remember anyway, over my career my three favorite programming languages were (in order from oldest to newest) - Turbo Pascal, C# and now Typescript - and apparently he created all three.

He certainly knows how to create programming languages that last.

I had the opportunity to hear him speak about language design at an MS Build conference and was very nearly actually fanboying; my coworkers were more than a little bemused.

He also did Delphi, and you can actually see quite a bit of it in the original design of C#.

Even more so when you look at stuff like WinForms - someone coming from VCL would see many familiar things.

And also the author of Delphi and Turbo Pascal.

loved turbo pascal a long time ago - got my professional start there - but I will forgive him for Delphi anyway :>)

What did you use between TurboPascal and C#? o-O

VB/VB6, with some Clipper and Foxpro mixed in.

Switched to c# instead of picking up vb.net - in retrospect a good call.

Classic progression - some of us came from VB Classic to C# others from C++ (at least in the Windows world). Now we're all one big happy family.

Even though I grew up with C as a kid, I still prefer VB.Net over C# as I believe the code is far more human-readable and less prone to technical errors - BUT, there is just no support for VB.Net. I got stick of having to convert code snippets I would find and this year I finally bit the bullet and moved to doing everything in C#.

Similar route here. I went from VB classic to JScript on the server (and client, so was doing isomorphic JavaScript 19 years ago!) and then to C3 a few years later.

Well I used VB4-6 and Delphi 5-6 extensively, and my experience was Delphi was lightyears ahead of VB, and I say that as someone who was deeply familiar with both and made heavy use of Dan Appleman's Visual Basic Programmer’s Guide to the Win32 API.

It sounds like you were maybe using it at a fairly surface level, for which VB was good because it was highly approachable sure, but the wheels fell off pretty quick when you had to push it. Delphi was beautiful because it made the easy stuff as easy as VB, but the hard stuff was still easy where in VB it was either impossible or required dropping down to Win32 APIs or calling other languages.

> I will forgive him for Delphi anyway

Sounds like you never used Delphi. Modern C sharp with whatever MS calls the GUI classes this week doesn't hold a candle to how fast you chouls whip up an UI in Delphi and then concentrate on actual functions.

Edit: talking about the Delphi before Microsoft offered Hejlsberg 1 million extra per year and Borland refused to match...

The original C# + Visual Studio was very similar to Delphi in many respects. Whipping up UI in particular; it even used the same anchor system for resizable widgets.

I'm under the impression that it's pretty hard to make custom controls that integrate with the UI builder in dot niet. Back when I used Delphi we had a legion. Made adding new user facing functions (in a data driven app mind) a breeze.

Not at all - I've done that kind of work myself. If anything, the designer integration in VS was more extensive.

(Keep in mind tho that this is about WinForms specifically, and is less true of the frameworks that followed it. It's also about the original .NET Framework, not the present state of affairs with .NET Core, which required a new designer.)

Your take on Delphi is very different to mine!

This always blows my mind, "Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than"

https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html

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