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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

One of the programs closest to my heart which I use multiple times a day, "Beyond Compare" is written in PASCAL, Delphi more specifically. I know very little about PASCAL, but I know that Beyond Compare is rock solid.

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Beyond Compare has to be one of my all time favorite programs.

I have to admit, however, that I never knew it was written in PASCAL. I think this is very cool.

An absolute gem of an application that not only does the job but near pefect ux.

Total Commander is also written in Delphi. Such a great program I would still be using if I was on windows.

You can use Double Commander (Linux version for you, I guess), which tries to be very close to Total Commander (plug-in compatibility even) and is written in Delphi too.

Unfortunately I'm on osx. But I already got used to coreutils, which are way more portable :)

Well technically that would be Object Pascal, yes?

I have actual nightmares about developing in Delphi. I can't believe there's a Delphi project that people speak this highly of.

Really? Delphi was generally a pleasure to use for the couple of years that I did.

The one thing Delphi really did wrong was to make GUI programming too easy. It was just too simple, too tempting, to just put all your code into your MainForm.pas, making it grow to over 10'000 LOC. If (and only if) the programmers took care to avoid code duplication and cared about writing good, solid code, Delphi rocked. Just like Lazarus (http://www.lazarus-ide.org/) does today. One of my weapons of choice nowadays when it comes to GUI development.

The only thing I wish it had is more documentation for those of us who never did any Pascal. I love Lazarus too, but it's quite a lot to take in when you're used to other languages. I basically have to "Guess" how to write code, which can become a lot more work with Delphi / FreePascal.

Try to get your hands on an old copy of Delphi 1 or 2. Thousands of pages of documentation in PDF format. Docs used to be so much better back then, it's sad. I still have a copy of Delphi 7 lying around just because the help system was/is so good.

Sadly I was more concerned about FreePascal than Delphi as well. But yeah, it's sad that documentation is dead these days.

Hah, the same thing could really be said of VB.Net

It's possible that being thrown at an ancient, loosely-managed Delphi project has given me a poor first impression of it.

Delphi was a wonderful product. Super fast compilation, nice IDE, small executables with no runtimes.

Age of Wonders was written with Delphi also. Great game.

Delphi's still around. You can even write mobile apps in it.

http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi

I am actually surprised by the number of clients I've dealt with developing products in some form of Delphi and other archaic languages.

Oh, I'm well aware of Delphi's continued existence. I'm maintaining a 15-year-old Delphi project right now.

I should be clear that I like Object Pascal. I just dislike the degree to which Delphi insists on holding your hand, and I hate the absurdly bloated code base for which that behavior is at least partly to blame.

Delphi is great and powerful, but it was so easy that a lot of people did bad things with it, ruining it's name.

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