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Comment by kaonashi | Hacker News Reader

Delphi… Delphi? Delphi?!?!

I am really having trouble understanding how anyone could choose Delphi without some sort of corruption going on.

Turbo Pascal was the standard when I was in high school (matriculated in 98). No idea what has been used in the interrim, although the article makes it look like Java, among other things. If this hadn't been the case, I could understand Delphi, but it makes very little sense now.

Pascal is a pretty good teaching language, Java is hopelessly complex. Delphi is too bloated for intro stuff. Simple, featureless, procedural languages that are not C are pretty good for beginners.

I'd be tempted to agree, but in that case you can even look at things like VB (in whichever flavour). You would need to somehow keep the subjects relevant to the current environment too, otherwise the clued up kids will get bored, and the less clued up ones will be more clued up, but in mostly irrelevant tech (school IT doesn't teach abstract computer science - it teaches stuff you can use to a degree).

It is worth noting that Pascal was originally intended as an extremely portable language to teach structured programming. It was only later that people began actually using it for real stuff.

The key to its portability was that it shipped with an interpreter that would run under a simple bytecode machine. Implement that bytecode and you could run Pascal on virtually anything. Back in 1970, this was a pretty useful feature.

Amazing... Turbo Pascal was the standard when I was in high school in 1986 as well....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_pascal

Apparently it's been around REALLY long! And it was the official language for SA secondary schools till 2002.

finished school in 94 with pascal as well, got to varsity and suddenly oberon. Pascal was an easy and great language to learn on (20 years ago). Delphi might not be that bad, the language seems nicely designed (from looking at it more than a decade ago) and java is not something I think high schoolers should be taught. C and Scheme should feature earlier IMO.

MIT used Scheme as a first programming language till around 2009. It doesn't really matter if a language is "old", as long as it helps students understand what needs to be taught.

It depends what province you are from. I matriculated in 2008 and went to school in the Eastern Cape where we still did Delphi. However, I think other places such as Gauteng and the Western Cape were doing Java. I remember the final exam being split into Delphi and java sections so these are probably the only languages being taught.

Still beats VB (albeit by an increasingly small margin).

Maybe their country is 20 years behind? Maybe it runs reasonably well on their i486 computers that are in their schools. I recall some some software service charities requiring compliance for old versions of PHP for the same reason.

I can verify that compliance requirement for older versions of PHP is still going strong. Last project for a charity completed with PHP 4.4 because "we have too much to rewrite" despite most of the platform being brand new.

Also sysadmins are unlikely to support platforms in which they cannot assert their dominance.

There's a fair amount of money sloshing around the South African school system, being wasted, I am pretty sure that the issue, whatever it is, isn't i486 computers.

Turbo C++ (like, the DOS-based IDE from 1994) is still the compiler of choice in many Indian universities.

Delphi is very heavily used in the financial industry in RSA and is one of the more common languages in use in the country (the others being Java and .NET). The IT industry as a whole is fairly backwards in the country and extremely slow to adopt to new trends. 'Number of years worked in a language' is really the only meter in use across most of the country's IT.

I agree about Java and .NET, but I haven't seen a Delphi job advertised in ages.

Also, I wonder if you are being a bit harsh about us being "extremely slow" to adapt to new trends, but that's just personal experience -maybe I've been lucky.

I've worked with vendors and clients from Europe and UK, and we seem to be able to keep up fine with them. I also know SA programmers who are doing fine in Australia. There's a lot of legacy crap that needs looking after, but that's a problem all over the world.

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