This was one of the first programming languages I used in a professional environment. In a moment of nostalgia I found out they had a promotion of their IDE (usually ridiculously expensive). It's pretty good to build a quick professional looking desktop app in it, at least, that's how I remember it. I'm not even sure if I remember enough of Pascal to write anything in it anymore, but I won't pass up a freebie.
If you plan on getting it, don't use a completely fake email, they're sending you the key that way.
Cool find. I worked with Borland Delphi for a while in the mid 90s when there wasn't much choice in visual development tools. I was mostly writing in Visual Basic 3.0 at the time but a friend turned me on to Delphi and it was amazing how much more advanced it was in comparison. It was certainly leaps and bounds ahead of Power Builder which many of my colleagues wrongly believed was the future of desktop development. Anyway, I left off at Delphi 7 and never looked it up again to see if it still existed until I had a recent bout of nostalgia and found out Embarcadero acquired it. The current incarnation looked interesting but too expensive to just play with so this free starter will allow me to take it for a test drive and see how it stacks up to Visual Studio development. Not sure I'll do anything remotely serious with it but it's nice to have an option built on a classic language.
and it was amazing how much more advanced it was in comparison.
The form designer still is
16-bit Delphi on Windows 3.11 in the 90s: You put a component on the form. Done. Nothing else to do for the programmer. Delphi automatically made it a field of the corresponding form class and you could access the component. It has the correct type and is always correctly initialized.
Android form designer, 2016: You put a view on the layout. It gets an id, but if you want to access it you need to call findViewById. And you need to cast it to the correct type. And you need to declare a variable to store it in. Or your own class field. Then you add another view on an unrelated layout and all the ids change, and it crashes or does not compile, till you make a clean build and recompile the entire project. Because? Because it is no Delphi, that's why
Well that's discouraging to hear. I haven't had a chance to dive into it yet so to find out it bears little resemblance to the Delphi of old makes me think it's not going to be worth working with. I guess it suffers from the same thing that most development tools do today: web mentality. The findViewById sounds too much like getElementById from JavaScript and makes me think the use will be just as horrific. Oh well, I guess all good things must come to an end at some point. I miss the 90s more now.
7 comments
3 u/BottomLine [OP] 03 Sep 2016 11:51
This was one of the first programming languages I used in a professional environment. In a moment of nostalgia I found out they had a promotion of their IDE (usually ridiculously expensive). It's pretty good to build a quick professional looking desktop app in it, at least, that's how I remember it. I'm not even sure if I remember enough of Pascal to write anything in it anymore, but I won't pass up a freebie.
If you plan on getting it, don't use a completely fake email, they're sending you the key that way.
1 u/Morbo 03 Sep 2016 19:09
Cool find. I worked with Borland Delphi for a while in the mid 90s when there wasn't much choice in visual development tools. I was mostly writing in Visual Basic 3.0 at the time but a friend turned me on to Delphi and it was amazing how much more advanced it was in comparison. It was certainly leaps and bounds ahead of Power Builder which many of my colleagues wrongly believed was the future of desktop development. Anyway, I left off at Delphi 7 and never looked it up again to see if it still existed until I had a recent bout of nostalgia and found out Embarcadero acquired it. The current incarnation looked interesting but too expensive to just play with so this free starter will allow me to take it for a test drive and see how it stacks up to Visual Studio development. Not sure I'll do anything remotely serious with it but it's nice to have an option built on a classic language.
0 u/BeniBela 11 Sep 2016 11:50
The form designer still is
16-bit Delphi on Windows 3.11 in the 90s: You put a component on the form. Done. Nothing else to do for the programmer. Delphi automatically made it a field of the corresponding form class and you could access the component. It has the correct type and is always correctly initialized.
Android form designer, 2016: You put a view on the layout. It gets an id, but if you want to access it you need to call
findViewById. And you need to cast it to the correct type. And you need to declare a variable to store it in. Or your own class field. Then you add another view on an unrelated layout and all the ids change, and it crashes or does not compile, till you make a clean build and recompile the entire project. Because? Because it is no Delphi, that's why0 u/Morbo 11 Sep 2016 18:19
Well that's discouraging to hear. I haven't had a chance to dive into it yet so to find out it bears little resemblance to the Delphi of old makes me think it's not going to be worth working with. I guess it suffers from the same thing that most development tools do today: web mentality. The
findViewByIdsounds too much likegetElementByIdfrom JavaScript and makes me think the use will be just as horrific. Oh well, I guess all good things must come to an end at some point. I miss the 90s more now.0 u/BeniBela 16 Sep 2016 22:45
I was not comparing old Delphi to new Delphi.
I was comparing old Delphi to non-Delphi
1 u/MagilaGorila 12 Oct 2016 16:10
The offer is available again!!!!! I just downloaded it for FREE :D
0 u/BeniBela 11 Sep 2016 10:38
Damn, missed it by two days