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Comment by siva7 | Hacker News Reader

Delphi -> C# -> Typescript.

This is the evolution. It has never been easier to make apps just by using a browser that runs on all platforms.

As a former Delphi developer, this is very far from truth, in my experience. Nothing modern beats the ease of RAD with Delphi, where you had actually business people making complex software (with a huge amount of tech debt, of course).

I'm not saying it's better - Delphi sucks for a lot of reasons - but this is the only aspect where it really shines.

Have you tried WinForms? It’s a similar workflow to Delphi except I find C# a lot nicer to work with than Pascal. WPF is also good if you need a program that’s more flexible with being resized, but you have to do your layout in XML rather than drag and drop (although you do still get live updates of what your window will look like while you’re writing the XML).

The drag and drop is what makes it good.

Interface builder had that on macOS; that’s basically dead now. I feel like Visual Basic had that too? I don’t know if that still exists.

"Dead" is a bit strong, no? More like de-emphasised for newcomers, and in maintenance mode?

I am not sure WinForms is as flexible as Delphi - especially when you need to write your own components with their own property sheet dialogs etc.

Also, Delphi apps can be made to run on Linux, Mac and even Android and IOS.

It is not exactly the same, because even with all improvements taken out from Midori learnings, C# is not on the same C++ like league as Delphi happens to be.

So with VCL/FireMonkey, you get all the RAD like tooling that VB/Delphi are famous for, full AOT, and low level systems programming capabilities, including inline Assembly.

What lots of reasons make Delphi suck? Genuine question.

From what I remember:

- the IDE was unstable and crashed a lot

- the license was very expensive and the commercial relationship felt predatory

- new features got added all the time, while long standing bugs weren't prioritized (e.g., mobile apps support)

In the C++ variant (a combination of C++ with Delphi wrappers):

- the compiler(!!) was unstable and crashed a lot, where you had to make small irrelevant changes to your code to make it compile without crashing itself

In general:

- the overall culture around it seemed to attract developers without concern for technical debt, which maybe was a consequence of Delphi's own strengths; i.e., every Delphi project was a big ball of mud that you had to fight against

That's the author's (Anders Hejlsberg) journey of these programming languages. Doesn't need to be evolution though.

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

Seems more like devolution. Mass appeal is rarely a sign of evolutionary progress.

Another example that it is a fallacy to equate evolution with progress.

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