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Comment by dguaraglia | Hacker News Reader

Not only that. Compilation was super fast, the debugger was pretty damn good, creating OLE objects was a breeze (every class had the full machinery to become an OLE object just by flipping a flag in the properties editor), writing networking code was super simple (VB's built in events would take care of the asynchronous nature of receiving data), installation builder... I could go on. It was light years ahead of the closest competitors (Visual C++ and Delphi.) People love to hate Visual Basic, but for its time it was revolutionary.

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I agree with most of what you've said, except for it being light years ahead of Delphi. I used both tools extensively in both a hobbyist and professional capacity from 1997 onward (VB 5, Delphi 3) and I couldn't say that one tool was significantly ahead of the other. They were both hugely similar and fantastic for rapid development. In fact I'd go so far as to say I preferred Delphi as its database capabilities were better (at least, in my experience) and I liked not having to package my software with a set of run-times. Although the latter was more important to the hobbyist side of me. Commercially, demanding a client had the required VB run-time files was no problem.

Delphi was a great tool! The database support was way ahead of VB, specially support of MySQL and other third party databases. I guess I always preferred C/C++ over Pascal for low-level stuff though, so even though I played around with it for quite a bit, I never became too proficient.

I hoped C++ Builder would close that gap with Delphi, but then .NET took over and the rest is (kind of) history.

What's fascinating to me is that some countries (Brazil, for one) still have a very active Delphi community, while in a lot of places it was more or less forgotten.

That's right, Brazil, Russia and China still have huge amounts of Delphi developers. To a lesser extent so do South Africa and Australia.

Would you believe me if I told you I currently work in a software house whose main suite of desktop products is still in Delphi? We've been using .NET since the mid-2000s (before I started here) for a few of our products, and all new development for desktop products in the past few years has been .NET, but the company's bread and butter and highly successful products are Delphi applications through and through.

It's still a capable development tool but the language is showing its age. I very rarely have to touch it any more but when I do I always get mixed emotions of "argh, Delphi sucks ass, I wish it had <insert any .NET language feature here>", and "oh man I forgot how awesome Delphi was, I wish it was this straightforward in .NET!" Comments such as the latter are few and far between, these days.

That's not surprising! Some really good enterprise and POS software got developed in Delphi (and other desktop frameworks/IDEs) back in the day. In Brazil a lot of businesses were starting to adopt POS, and having someone building a billing program for you was all the rage. There's little incentive to update such systems as long as they work. Not everything needs to be a website! (shakes walking stick and shouts to kids to get off his lawn)

I remember hating .NET in the beginning. Performance was abysmal and anything mildly low-level took a lot of work. I made some good money as a freelancer writing COM libraries or C++ libraries with a thin C# wrapper so that they could be used by companies that had bought into the whole .NET thing.

Then C# introduced generics, and it started breaking away from the similarities to Java. Things improved and in time .NET became a very capable runtime/framework. I'm actually excited to see Microsoft finally opening it up. As much as I love Python, the cloud and all the fancy new stuff we have nowadays, I occasionally long for the good old days when desktop software reigned supreme.

OK, better go to sleep now. I'm starting to sound like an old fogy :)

My day job is at a software shop that still has ~90% (millions of LOC) of its application suite in VB6!

Interesting bit aside: The current Delphi versions are becoming better again, to the point of actually being usable. Now it's just that its reputation was ruined when Borland decided to f*ck it up. I'm using it at work to build an Android app, and despite the slow buggy IDE, I'm more productive with it than with IntelliJ (for Android dev) or Visual Studio (for Windows apps)...

That is an impressive statement. Can you share some link about Delphi new Android capabilities, I was not aware it could handle mobile. I think I am stuck in the 90s Delphi.

Well, great info on the Embarcadero's website about Delphi + Android: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/android-app-deve...

And here are examples of using it (with source): https://www.embarcadero.com/products/rad-studio/android-ios-...

thanks!

Turbo Pascal and later Delphi were great!

If Borland hadn't mismanaged everything the way they did in the mid-90's, maybe C and C++ wouldn't have the spotlight they enjoy nowadays.

I don't think Borland's mismanagement was a strong factor in C/C++ gaining mindshare.

The native OS interfaces on popular platforms (Win32, Posix) were in C, so it would have always been a 2nd class citizen.

I believe that Delphi was already on a decline when Borland decided to self destruct.

On Win32, they had a tough time competing after VisualBasic v5.0, where Microsoft had a larger mind-share.

On Linux, I had hopes with the Kylix port, but it was abandoned by Borland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylix_(software)

On Windows, Borland was always late with SDK support so we were forced to write our own wrappers. I gave up by Delphi 1.0, after being mainly focused on Turbo Pascal since the 5.5 version.

Regarding Kylix, I would say it was badly managed from the start.

So yeah, eventually the way out for better Windows support was C++/MFC, as even Borland's C++ compilers had their own set of issues.

But, this is a big but, if Borland managed to push Delphi the same way Sun pushed Java, then I think the mindshare story would be quite different.

A memory safe programming language, with RAD tooling support, capable of system programming tasks with native executables.

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