upvote

points

by kqr5 hours ago |
comments
upvoteby Tallain3 hours ago|
next
[-]
The RAD environment makes it insanely quick and easy to throw together a reasonably functional desktop app. Think WinForms on steroids. For all its age and the many cracks and seams, it's still very fast, easy for beginners and pros alike, and the final executable is a single tiny file (usually)
reply
upvoteby marginalia_nu5 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
Delphi had a powerful and easy to use GUI editor in the early 2000s, much less of a hassle compared to building software with Windows' own C++ API.
reply
upvoteby blackhaz5 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
As a kid I remember I was lost in all that OOP, window handles and stuff, and could never do anything. Delphi was like assembling Lego. Very similar to QtCreator.
reply
upvoteby morkalork3 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
It was like Visual Basic and Pascal had a baby
reply
upvoteby ChrisGreenHeur4 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
I remember borrowing a book that had it on a cd, it already had the GUI editor, this must have been around 1997 or so.
reply
upvoteby kevin_thibedeau3 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
I keep a Windows VM for one app that is a commercial Delphi program for embroidery editing. It's been around for 30 years and is on the path to getting cross platform support soon with recent GUI revisions. Always been pretty solid for a product from a small team.
reply
upvoteby scrapcode4 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
The GUI builder was more powerful than the one provided by VS, from what I remember (20+ years ago since I've dabbled in it). I really miss that era. In certain circles you could open an application and almost get a sense as to who built it due to the craftsmanship / UI / attention to detail in the placement of the elements in the application, etc.
reply
upvoteby haspok4 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
Perhaps a better way to look at it would be to say that Visual Studio had a resource editor UI, basically a frontend to a resource file - that's it.

In contrast, Delphi provided you all the UI code by default, so even if you did not write a single line of code, your program ran and displayed a window or dialog with all the UI elements you could interact with. This was a higher level abstraction (one could argue VS did not even have an abstraction - you still had to code your window procedure from scratch. MFC was the first real attempt at simplifying UI code, but you still had to write code...).

But it did not stop here: it was trivially easy to add a database "connection" to your app (IIRC it was represented by a UI element that was not actually displayed), just provide the connection parameters, connect it to a complex UI element like a table, and voila - you had a live database view within 5 minutes.

reply
upvoteby Tallain2 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
Yeah, a lot of non-visual components still require (or want) you to drag-and-drop them in the builder and edit many or most properties there. It's a weird thing to adjust to, and it often leads to a very cluttered view if you have a lot of them. Conversely, a cluttered view with a ton of non-visual components can be a very easy-to-spot signal that you might be trying to do too much in one screen.
reply
upvoteby thibaut_barrere4 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
Even before, Turbo Pascal was fairly appreciated in some circles (e.g. demomaking), quite productive and nice to use!
reply
upvoteby oblio1 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
Turbo Pascal was the go to IDE for small commercial apps for quite a few years after its release.
reply
upvoteby sieve5 hours ago|
prev|
[-]
I noticed this as well in the 2000s. Stuff like WinHex which I was pretty sure then was written using Delphi. Was into RE during those days, so I used to poke around the internals of software just for fun
reply
upvoteby coldpie3 minutes ago|
parent|
[-]
Ran into this quite a bit while working on Wine, too. Start digging into a program's behavior to fix some Wine bug and, "oh, huh, it's another Delphi app."
reply