Happy 27th Birthday, Delphi | Hacker News Reader

Happy 27th Birthday, Delphi

blogs.remobjects.com

40 pointswdb16 comments

I wrote Windows Desktop software with Delphi 2 through 6 from 1996 to 2003. It was simply decades ahead of it's time in terms of simplicity, extensibility and speed of development.

In 2015 I had to write something for Windows again and used Lazarus [1]

In 2016 was forced to write a GUI driven Windows desktop application in Java and my colleagues could hear me scream. How did Delphi solve the problems that Java still failed at 20 years later?

1. https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

> How did Delphi solve the problems that Java still failed at 20 years later?

Writing Windows Desktop software was the primary focus of Delphi. Writing desktop software (but not Windows more than anything else) was one of many early focuses of Java, but never what you’d call the one primary focus, and by 2016 it had barely even been a focus for years.

So, in short, by viewing it as the most important problem to solve.

I did a ton with Delphi in those years, too. It was a good mix of hobby and bespoke stuff as a freelancer. Must've been around 2000 that I got a pay-the-bills kind of job with a software company. It was 100% Visual Basic. VB was pretty revolutionary, too, but it felt like such a huge step back. Borland did some tremendous stuff.

FWIW, Delphi was the fastest/best way to create early Winsock app for Windows.

My little ISP (back in '94/'95) used it to create a network installer to install OTHER Winsock apps. It was basically our poor man's Steam.

Recent and related:

Delphi Timewarp – 1995 and Delphi’s Mythical Origins - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30284596 - Feb 2022 (63 comments)

Other big Delphi threads, if anyone's curious:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I cut my teeth on Delphi and didn't realize how good I had it. Nice, snappy IDE with point-and-click GUI builder, solid interactive debugger, robust library of free and paid components.

If you liked Delphi then Lazarus is a great open source alternative for WYSIWYG Linux and Windows forms based application programming.

Recently I used it to create a little SQL editor with syntax highlighting for Maria DB. It only took a few hours which was mostly due to me trying to remember my Pascal syntax.

Lazarus also has a nice online package manager with a 1.5 zillion components available.

Object Pascal can feel antiquated. But Free Pascal remains fast, stable, and reasonably feature rich without much syntax bloat over the years.

Despite what people think, old languages never really die. There are modern commercial versions of Delphi (from Embarcadero and RemObjects). It may not be trendy to use them, but if you found the perfect language decades ago, chances are someone out there is still maintaining and modernizing it.

I did a whole lot of consultancy work using Delphi 2 and 3 way back then, and it was incredibly productive, but I always thought that Delphi was hampered by having Pascal as the underlying programming language. It seems that Anders felt the same - hence C#.

Geez louise I've made some money with this tool. Always been good to me. Anders adulterated it a little too much for me, and I wish it had gone more M2 green threads, but it's still the best win desktop tool available.

“He was the original author of Turbo Pascal and the chief architect of Delphi.” -- Wikipedia

The creator of Turbo Pascal and architect of Delphi adulterated Delphi too much?

How so?

Delphi was always challenged for a popularity slot because of the tyranny of C langs. My impression is that Anders went into "me too" mode, maybe from marketing pressure. They had a solid green thread lib but never made use of it in Delphi.

I think Visual Basic -- with the full weight of Microsoft behind it -- was a much bigger problem than thread libraries.

Well it's current state also. VB is gone, Delphi survived. Green threads and a different error mechanism besides exceptions would have encouraged more attention to server dev.

I have always liked it, from Turbo Pascal, through to Object Pascal, Delphi 7 and Berlin. Delphi is still very good, but it is expensive, and I can't stand the current owner. Literally the only time I ever paid 1000 pounds for a compiler that I am no longer allowed to reinstall because I don't subscribe to annual updates.

I miss Borland C++ Builder. That was a ton of fun.

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