Delphi GUI Programming in 2021?
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Just stumbled upon this book and I'm shocked that it was just published in Nov. 2020. Maybe, Microsoft will release a new Petzold, Programming Windows 10, next. :rolleyes: Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey: Unleash the full potential of the FMX framework to build exciting cross-platform apps with Embarcadero Delphi[^] Are people out there still using Delphi? My company used the technology before 2000 and around 2005 started converting to .NET. We do have some old code in Delphi but most has been rewritten.
Our main application was written over many years in Delphi v5 (yes version 5). This is now being converted to WPF. We have the complication that the WPF .Net code has to integrate with Delphi and open in MDI windows within the main Delphi application. ;P Eventually all the Delphi screens and functionality will be rewritten and we will switch over to a complete .Net application. Still many screens to be done. :)
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Pascal is good. It's syntax is ugly, though.
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?" -- Rigoletto
May be ugly, but you never accidentally assigned something in an if condition. := All day long. The one thing I truly miss about Delphi.
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated.
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Just stumbled upon this book and I'm shocked that it was just published in Nov. 2020. Maybe, Microsoft will release a new Petzold, Programming Windows 10, next. :rolleyes: Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey: Unleash the full potential of the FMX framework to build exciting cross-platform apps with Embarcadero Delphi[^] Are people out there still using Delphi? My company used the technology before 2000 and around 2005 started converting to .NET. We do have some old code in Delphi but most has been rewritten.
I still maintain some programs written in Delphi 5 ...
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Just stumbled upon this book and I'm shocked that it was just published in Nov. 2020. Maybe, Microsoft will release a new Petzold, Programming Windows 10, next. :rolleyes: Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey: Unleash the full potential of the FMX framework to build exciting cross-platform apps with Embarcadero Delphi[^] Are people out there still using Delphi? My company used the technology before 2000 and around 2005 started converting to .NET. We do have some old code in Delphi but most has been rewritten.
Funny, I just finished upgrading to Delphi Sydney (10.4)... It is still simply the best GUI development experience I've had. The remaining components are pretty rock solid. The Clients still enjoying the software. One product is literally 20 years old, just got a facelift! And about the book. FMX is the Alternate to VCL. It is cross platform, so it runs on android, MAC, iOS and windows... One set of controls... This is LITERALLY a 2021 topic, is it not? One code base, trying to hit every platform. And call MSFT Press, tell them Xamarin needs a book published :-)
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May be ugly, but you never accidentally assigned something in an if condition. := All day long. The one thing I truly miss about Delphi.
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated.
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I am also actively developing things in Delphi and maintaining both large and small existing applications. For Desktop app development it is by far the most productive environment I know. Too sad that it is perceived as legacy, but then it seems that the whole concept of Desktop apps is becoming legacy - apparently running everything in a browser is the way to go these days. So in that respect WinForms and WPF is legacy too :rolleyes:.
Jan Holst Jensen2 wrote:
So in that respect WinForms and WPF is legacy too
I actually totally agree with that statement. Desktop development is now legacy. And, I actually understand it a bit too, since the desktop is now passe. I run Ubuntu 20.04 and only use Win10 through remote session/VMs to do work at job. THe only thing I cannot do on Ubuntu is...win10 desktop development (which we do at work). Not trying to be a Linux fanboy, just interesting. And, honestly Ubuntu uses less ram, runs less background processes that eat my processor, etc. Just lighter-weight than Win10.
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Assignment is the most used operator in procedural programming. Choosing a two characters sequence for assignment and just a single character for comparison is rather unfortunate.
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?" -- Rigoletto
Yeah, I really LOVE the JS approach of =, ==, ===, ==== (I hope I didn't miss a comparison, I forget which one means the left side is equal, in context, but not of type, against a mutated version of the Right Hand Side... LOL) The := jams me up when I switch between other languages, admittedly. But I will argue that the "." is the most used, as in
sVal := dsCustomer.FieldByName('Value').AsString;
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Funny, I just finished upgrading to Delphi Sydney (10.4)... It is still simply the best GUI development experience I've had. The remaining components are pretty rock solid. The Clients still enjoying the software. One product is literally 20 years old, just got a facelift! And about the book. FMX is the Alternate to VCL. It is cross platform, so it runs on android, MAC, iOS and windows... One set of controls... This is LITERALLY a 2021 topic, is it not? One code base, trying to hit every platform. And call MSFT Press, tell them Xamarin needs a book published :-)
Kirk 10389821 wrote:
And call MSFT Press, tell them Xamarin needs a book published
I think the reason they haven't published a Xamarin book yet, is because Xamarin is still not complete itself*. :rolleyes: *This was an intentional troll for all those (5 or less**) Xamarin devs out there **This was a secondary (and uncalled for) troll to the Xamarin devs.
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Yeah, I really LOVE the JS approach of =, ==, ===, ==== (I hope I didn't miss a comparison, I forget which one means the left side is equal, in context, but not of type, against a mutated version of the Right Hand Side... LOL) The := jams me up when I switch between other languages, admittedly. But I will argue that the "." is the most used, as in
sVal := dsCustomer.FieldByName('Value').AsString;
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Just stumbled upon this book and I'm shocked that it was just published in Nov. 2020. Maybe, Microsoft will release a new Petzold, Programming Windows 10, next. :rolleyes: Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey: Unleash the full potential of the FMX framework to build exciting cross-platform apps with Embarcadero Delphi[^] Are people out there still using Delphi? My company used the technology before 2000 and around 2005 started converting to .NET. We do have some old code in Delphi but most has been rewritten.
Powerful and fast programming but too expensive. Take a look at Lazarus...
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Jan Holst Jensen2 wrote:
So in that respect WinForms and WPF is legacy too
I actually totally agree with that statement. Desktop development is now legacy. And, I actually understand it a bit too, since the desktop is now passe. I run Ubuntu 20.04 and only use Win10 through remote session/VMs to do work at job. THe only thing I cannot do on Ubuntu is...win10 desktop development (which we do at work). Not trying to be a Linux fanboy, just interesting. And, honestly Ubuntu uses less ram, runs less background processes that eat my processor, etc. Just lighter-weight than Win10.
I also like Linux and use it quite a bit. When on Linux I use LibreOffice, GIMP, QtCreator, GEdit, Atril document viewer, SimpleScan ... and sometimes a browser. So mostly Desktop applications :^). But hey - I am over 50 so I am legacy myself :laugh: .
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Slacker007 wrote:
Delphi is primarily used still for legacy apps.
Yeah, that's what I thought too. That's definitely the situation where I work. Also, it is interesting to me, because the MFC was far better than Borland stuff (IMO), but you certainly are not going to see a new book released on developing with MFC. And there are a lot of MFC devs around. Maybe more than Delphi. Maybe not.
MFC was better than Borland OWL, by far. But not even close to Delphi. Delphi was VB done right (with component developers, users, and extenders all using the same tools/language), but too late to steal the market. Delphi was/is all the power of a full blown native language, with a lightning fast single pass compiler, inline assembler, and easy access to the entire Windows API. It has(had?) built in OLE compatible reference counting and interfaces for simple memory management (without the cost of garbage collection). I was the first person to ever ship a commercial application written (partially) in Delphi (I was at Borland at the time, and got special dispensation to ship using a pre-release version of Delphi, otherwise Delphi would have been the first). After leaving Borland, I used Delphi to build many commercial systems, and the productivity it brought to the team significantly outweighed the learning curve (I particularly appreciated that moving old C programmers to Delphi helped them to learn and write true Object Oriented code, which migrating to C++ would not have done). There are still things I like about Delphi better than .NET (like the way fields are modeled for SQL), but as I've been working for Microsoft for the last 15 years, I've come to appreciate a lot about .NET (Although I still have quite a bit of old Delphi code sitting on my home computer, I also have not been able to use Delphi for quite a while, so my experience is quite dated :-(). But I would certainly give it a good look if I left Microsoft and was looking for something cross platform (although .NET Core is doing a pretty good job in that space now from my limited viewpoint).
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Just stumbled upon this book and I'm shocked that it was just published in Nov. 2020. Maybe, Microsoft will release a new Petzold, Programming Windows 10, next. :rolleyes: Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey: Unleash the full potential of the FMX framework to build exciting cross-platform apps with Embarcadero Delphi[^] Are people out there still using Delphi? My company used the technology before 2000 and around 2005 started converting to .NET. We do have some old code in Delphi but most has been rewritten.
Pascal/Delphi is still very active; I get newsletters from Embarcadero frequently. Visiting the sites and forums associated with FreePascal and Delphi both entertain a pretty deep audience albeit not being incredibly large like Python/C/C++ user groups they're still active & sizeable. Delphi gets annual updates every time C++Builder does unless the update is a language specific bug fix or patch.
I was unaware of that...
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Just stumbled upon this book and I'm shocked that it was just published in Nov. 2020. Maybe, Microsoft will release a new Petzold, Programming Windows 10, next. :rolleyes: Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey: Unleash the full potential of the FMX framework to build exciting cross-platform apps with Embarcadero Delphi[^] Are people out there still using Delphi? My company used the technology before 2000 and around 2005 started converting to .NET. We do have some old code in Delphi but most has been rewritten.
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%%%%%% %%%% = = %%C > \_)' \_( .' , \_\_/ |\_/\\ " \*. o /\` \\\_\\ \\/ %\`= '\_ . / ) \\/| .^',\*. , /' /- o/ - " % '\_ /\\\_/ < = , ^ ~ . )\_o|----'| .\` ' \_\_\_// (\_ - (\\ ///-( \\' \\\\"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Just stumbled upon this book and I'm shocked that it was just published in Nov. 2020. Maybe, Microsoft will release a new Petzold, Programming Windows 10, next. :rolleyes: Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey: Unleash the full potential of the FMX framework to build exciting cross-platform apps with Embarcadero Delphi[^] Are people out there still using Delphi? My company used the technology before 2000 and around 2005 started converting to .NET. We do have some old code in Delphi but most has been rewritten.
I miss Delphi. I have many fond memories of it. I've been writing analysis code so long that I can't even remember what it was like programming in it, except that it isn't as painful as the languages I use now for analysis.
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For it's time, Pascal was pretty good - way better than the other "pointer based" language that was big at the time: Algol (C didn't come out until two years after Pascal, and took more years to gain real traction). Yes, COBOL had pointers, but ... X| The problem is that Pascal is nearly 50 years old, and really shows it's age when you compare it to modern languages, though it's been extended pretty well over the years. I don't use it - C# these days!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
Some later versions of Algol (maybe W and 68R / 68S ?) could emulate pointers but they weren't a feature of 58 or 60. The nearest Algol-60 came to pointers were 'thunks' - functions passed as parameters, which 'modern' languages think that they invented. C is notorious for pointers. I found Pascal cumbersome - so many meanings of the word END. It's only useful feature was ATFs (anonymous tag fields). Admittedly, my experience of it was mostly porting the P-Code compiler and optimising its expression evaluators.
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Just stumbled upon this book and I'm shocked that it was just published in Nov. 2020. Maybe, Microsoft will release a new Petzold, Programming Windows 10, next. :rolleyes: Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey: Unleash the full potential of the FMX framework to build exciting cross-platform apps with Embarcadero Delphi[^] Are people out there still using Delphi? My company used the technology before 2000 and around 2005 started converting to .NET. We do have some old code in Delphi but most has been rewritten.
Why are you so surprised? Delphi was and still is IMHO the (one of the) best Windows development environment and programming languages. The only downside is that the current owners of it made it a pretty much enterprise level tool by raising the price to astronomic levels. Mainly because of that, beside an easier cross development between Windows, Linux and macOS, I switched years ago to FreePascal, with the Lazarus IDE (and library). Lazarus/FreePascal is mostly Delphi compatible and both are very viable tools for programming in Object Pascal...
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Just stumbled upon this book and I'm shocked that it was just published in Nov. 2020. Maybe, Microsoft will release a new Petzold, Programming Windows 10, next. :rolleyes: Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey: Unleash the full potential of the FMX framework to build exciting cross-platform apps with Embarcadero Delphi[^] Are people out there still using Delphi? My company used the technology before 2000 and around 2005 started converting to .NET. We do have some old code in Delphi but most has been rewritten.
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I have read online that the language is not dead, but dying. Delphi is losing more programmers than gaining. Delphi is primarily used still for legacy apps.
Kind of nonsense. It is neither dead nor dying, nor are only legacy apps developed in Delphi. Or Object Pascal in general (including FreePascal & Lazarus here)...
