Comment by unnouinceput | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unnouinceput | Hacker News Reader

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1: "I only wish Delphi had a "favorites" filter for the Object Inspector, so you could quickly access your most needed..."

I recommend you install GExperts. It's a free, sources included, nifty utility that greatly improves Delphi IDE.

2: "The other thing Delphi should really have is a way to "package and export" (or snapshot) the whole Delphi setup...." ... "....I find it still a big pain to open an old project on a new machine and having to spend three hours searching and installing components in their latest versions again"

Those are 2 different things. For 1st part, get a docker container / VirtualBox / VMware machine and you can get everything in the snapshot way. I have a VMWare machine from 2007 with Delphi 7 and tons of components from that era, that works like a charm to this day. For 2nd part, to get latest version of components for latest version of Delphi - well, there is a GetIt package manager built in Delphi directly or you can just get the components from their vendors and use their installer. All major Delphi component vendors (TMS, DevExpress, ReportBuilder, etc) have that.

Have fun, I know I do everyday in Delphi. I am a freelancer for 13 years already and 90% of my projects are in Delphi.

> I have a VMWare machine from 2007 with Delphi 7 and tons of components from that era, that works like a charm to this day.

I did the same back in 2007 or 2008 after spending 3 days with a consultant setting it up.

Then, before I got a working backup, the external drive that we had it on broke down :-/

Still remember the process:

I hunted source forge, bookshelves, file shares, cabinets and old vendor web sites to find every dependency we needed.

This was around the same time I was introduced to Maven and while it took me a while to fully grasp Maven, once I realized that one small tool could replace this process I was sold.

(To anyone who grew up with Nuget or NPM/Yarn: back you added depencies in Visual Studio the same way as you did in Delphi, by downloading them and double clicking them and clicking next, next, next, accept, next and install. And everyone still knew Javascript was a toy language and didn't need a package manager.)

I did not know that Pascal is still in use till today. What kind of freelancing projects are in demand? I mean in Delphi/Pascal. If you do not mind my asking.

Anything a business needs. The idea is to actually hunt for a business owner that has problems and they don't care about the programming language you use to solve the problems. When I quote the estimated hours of some application they need in Delphi vs React or C# or whatever other programming language they heard through the vine is good for them, they always choose Delphi. In the end they care about problem solving, not the tech behind.

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