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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

It was like Visual Basic and Pascal had a baby

It was never clear to me who showed up first, but I used Delphi first and then tried Visual Basic and was like "Oh! It's here too!"

Well if you were familiar with Delphi the VB magic broke when you tried to make your own components for the designer.

I went the same path and it was a bit of a shock when I found out i have to fire up Visual C++ to do a custom VB button.

Yeah, but on the other hand Microsoft also offered Visual Basic which was definitely easier to use. The code wasn't as fast, but it wasn't a snail as MS added a compile option (to p-code if I remember correctly) in version 4.0.

Vb 6 got native compilation too

Only to be killed in VB.Net.

It took all these years to have what should be in the box on .NET 1.0 instead of NGEN.

To be honest, VB.Net was a very thin veneer of VB on top of the .Net runtime. It was not good. All of us that were doing Delphi quickly jumped to C#, because it felt a lot more grown up. The only truly terrible products I have worked on after ,Net came on the scene were ones where VB developers decided to use VB.Net to make something "more modern."

Back ~30 years ago, Delphi wasn’t easy compared to Sybase Power++! for example. At that time it was really GUI based efiting

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.

Mid 90s rather than early 2000s.

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