This reminds me of a few (<10) years back when a high school student needed some C programming assistance.
I then found out that they were being taught to use Borland Turbo C.
I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its all they know.
Borland C and Pascal were great for learning programming in mid-90s, because of one crucial feature: an immensely good built in help reference.
Whenever you wanted to know syntax of some command, you print this command, press ctrl-f1 and is presented with docs, complete with a working example. It was insanely great. Remember, stack overflow didn't exist then.
The mistake is assuming Delphi is bad and stupid. Delphi is MUCH better than C and C++.
Miles ahead.
Pascal is what we need, but C is what we deserve. Billons of dollars wasted in it.
What it have bad is the massive mismanagement of the owners, and that translate to lack the influx of talent to it.
Note: I'm moderator in a Delphi forum and use it for years. I'm now in rust, and is great yet:
- Some of the problems that rust fix? Delphi too decades ago.
- Delphi still compile so fast. All the stupid c-based langs are turtles. Including LLVM. Is a sad joke that "I use C-/C++/rust" for performance and the compilers NOT PERFORM. Period.
- All the other currents langs on earth, all of them, still fail at build a GUI easily.
- Only recently, with Go and now rust, people rediscover the joy of easy deployment. Delphi have it decades ago.
Of curse Delphi is not perfect, and we the users know it. Sadly, in this industry worse is better and without a path to improve the lang you are at mercy of the owners. But like smalltalk, foxpro, hypercard and others, Delphi is a testament of what could be a decent lang/environment.
That the community at large still inflect itself with massive amounts of pain and billons of wasted effort with c/c++/js and still refuse to learn? Is something I will never understand.
P.D.2: If this sound like a rant? Yes. My super-duper machine is still compiling with rust and I'm frustrated, because this post remind me that this pain could be avoided...
What's the problem with it? Programming snob? Isn't it still C programming after all? I don't understand the problem with people bashing Borland after all these years! Didn't you know that the accomplished Mr Anders Hejlsberg was behind Borland (TurboPascal and Delphi), before he was appointed to develop Microsoft C# and Typescript? So, what's the/your problem!?
I see your point, but the rationale might be completely different. Most programmers nowadays focus on web programming. The main reasons for this are partly technical (easy deployment, easier upgrades, multi-platform) and partly political (subscription model, complete control of user data).
Now, a minority of us believe that desktop apps are really worth fighting for. They are fast, they give user control over their data, they can work offline, and the subscription model is optional rather than built in. Some in the mainstream would like this to be killed. Some companies like Apple approve it as long as they get their cut. But most simply don't care. If you don't want a future where everything you use is controlled by someone else, then the Turkish decision is not meaningless.
Had I been that minister, I would absolutely do something similar to what Turkey did.
If the goal is to get more students to become programming literate, then the last thing that I would want is to pick a random flavor of the day language, with some frameworks, and some "best practices" debated to the oblivion on HN or Reddit. I would want all schools have a pretty standard system, with identical software that works identically because the goal of that software is to act as a pen and paper in a class. It needs to get out of the way.
Imagine the conversation had they picked C++ and do Linux. First, there's going to be a multi-year debate if we should be using Ubunto, Centos, Arch, until some pointy headed expert says "The future is in CoreOS!" just before everyone decides to standardize on Fedora. After that there would be a fight about versions, because everyone knows we should always run the latest. That's except for the group of people over there, that are refusing to run the latest and want to run the proven. Oh and they do not want to do C++, they hate C++ and say it should be Rust and since it is a Linux system and shadow IT is pretty easy on it, they are going to teach Rust! Or mostly argue about teaching Rust... etc... etc.. etc.
Here's a thing - if 10% of students gets out of the Delphi environment and starts messing with GCC for any reason then the program already succeeded in achieving the goal.
> and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its all they know.
A little bit too harsh. As the article points out Delphi is currently #12 on the TIOBE Index [0]. Above Go for example.
and think that they actually didn't get a job at teaching programming but they involved in politics and appointed as "Minister of Technology" for their "loyalty" to the Head of State. That's what Turkey is dealing with right now.
5 or 6 years ago, our ex-minister, claimed that it is dangerous to work with computers since they can be challenging for the mind in a conference about cloud computing. Let that sink in.
I wouldn't call Delphi ancient. It's not like they haven't been updating it. Delphi can target Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and Linux. It's pretty good:
On the positive side, Turbo C didn't include telemetry and didn't have to download "plugins" from the internet.
Delphi is a modern development environment. I haven't used it recently, but it was incredible in the 90s/00s and I know it kept adding features and platforms. AFAIK Beyond Compare is built with Delphi.
You missed one important point about Turbo C: The debugger. It has an amazing UI even at today's standard. If you need an all-in-one tool to teach programming (esp focus on the concepts), Turbo C is still a good choice.
I wonder if anyone has come up with a TurboC-like UI "theme" for, e.g. Emacs. Freepascal uses a Turbo-like UI by default and a free reimplementation known as RHIDE is already (IIRC) part of the FreeDOS distribution, so recreating the UI itself shouldn't be too hard. It might be a fun way to boost adoption of these terminal-based tools, since the ergonomics and UX is in fact quite reminiscent of modern IDE's.
What does it matter which programming language they learn in high school? It's not supposed to be the language you use for work. It's supposed to teach you to program.
If anything it should be mandatory to learn something else. It might be the only non-work programming language they will ever learn. Cradle to grave Python / Java?
Would Common Lisp / Haskell be considered a bad / good / ancient choice?
Or someone marketed the software to Turkey as a great way to increase their IT skill set as a country. Borland was awesome back in the day (at least in my opinion) but what Embarcadero has done with the software in years recent is a travesty. If they're going to insist on Pascal they should go with Lazarus.
I've been toying with the idea of running a few classes to help early and mid-career adults learn to program. Although it's been so long since I first learned that I worry I'd struggle to get the basics across.
Does anyone have a recommendation for a good, up to date, open source, introduction to programming? Ideally something that uses an experienced programmer (i.e. me) to guide.
A classic, time-tested pedagogical approach that makes it easy for a student to reason about what the hardware is doing to execute their code... or a flavour-of-the-month JS “framework” that is impossible to reason about and really will be obsolete before the end of term? Hmm tricky.
I had to giggle recently when I heard "Delphi is dead". It's not. And I don't think it ever will, because, both as a language and work environment, it is quite powerful.
It has pretty low entry barriers, and is pretty capable. When I used it (as a hobbiest, during Delphi 5 and Delphi 7 times), it had a superb tooling, and a really efficient compiler. Everything "just worked". It's now 15 - 20 years ago, when we created really tiny Windows exe files. A notepad.exe clone in only 23kb size - with no external dependencies at all, just using pure Windows32 API and Delphi. These where truely fun times.
Totally agreed. I was fortunate enough to start real programming with Delphi 5 (and then 7). Nowadays I know dozens of languages and frameworks but nothing comes close to the experience of quickly prototyping apps that at the end looked good, didn't need any dependencies and were super-small.
Another benefit was that it was possible to interoperate with low-level Win32 API and the enormous component library provided by third-party authors.
I use Delphi on a daily basis to code internally-used marketing automation tools. There is nothing that comes remotely close to it in terms of ease of debugging and overall productivity. There are better languages/tools to use for public-facing products, but for "I just need it to run" type projects, it works flawlessly.
That's not how I remember it. An empty statically linked VCL GUI application used to weigh about 700 KB. Just as stupid edgy kids usually do, we were looking at other "C++ applications" a dozen KBs in size and were ranting about Delphi being so bloated and terrible. Of course, it was due to them being built on top of pure Win32 API, or being dynamically linked to a similar "bloated" runtime.
It's not like we had an internet connection to learn from.
At least that's how I learned the difference between static and dynamic linking.
Grammar note: "hobbyist". "-ist" is the suffix for, "A person who does this thing"; "-est" is the suffix for changing an adjective into a superlative: "Yours is hobby, his is hobbier, mine is the hobbiest."
I really don't want to sound cynical about this great initiative(!) but it saddens me that among many open modern languages and tools, they instead opted for Delphi.
I cannot think of a single positive reason behind this decision in 2020. All I can think of is that the people that came to this conclusion are the ones who graduated from Computer Science related studies in ~1998-2004~ and immediately got themselves in politics. I lost count of how many times have I heard that if you pay for it, it's just better...
Finally, I admit that I'm definitely highly biassed when it comes to Turkish Politics.
I mean, one may assume incompetence and corruption. And perhaps that's the case.
But on the other hand, teaching languages are not the same as production languages. There are a number of languages that may be more powerful, but I think Delphi is a decent choice for teaching.
* You want to teach principles. Delphi allows you to teach OOP principles. You may or may not agree that OOP should be the starting paradigm, but that is at least a popular and conventional opinion.
* You don't want complexity. I am sure there are many alternatives that do things better. Heck, I am sure some Haskell guy will tell us itt how he can build a graphical interface in half a line of code. But remember these are kids who may not even understand what a program even is!
* You want results. In particular, it should be easy to create things like a user interface via the IDE. The fun about learning programming is to create something cool. Kids today most often use UI's and not terminals, and I think there is real value to allowing them to create something they might actually use. If you struggle through understanding your first program, and all it does is to print out "Hello World" on a black interface, it is somewhat underwhelming.
But if you can use the IDE to create your custom "hello world" box with pink borders and a unicorn picture - well that's cool!
* Of course you want students to be able to transfer their skills to other languages. But that's arguably not a big issue with Pascal.
* Finally, you want it all in one package. If you have to learn a vast module infrastructure, it just complicates things. Here is your "language", you can do everything in it.
I remember when we were learning, we started to try to build games and stuff. We used the tools available to use, because it was all very complex and we understood little. It was useful to have such a limited toolbox in the view of complexity. I think if we were forced to think about modules and many, many options to do a thing, we'd probably give up. Of course it is educational to try to come up with a solution with a limited set of tools!
From this perspective, Delphi is not a bad choice. Indeed I think the only other similar choice would be C#, which would probably cost more.
I don't think the motivation is teaching-related at all. For teaching there are way better languages than Object Pascal, which is kind of outdated and has a lot of anachronisms.
However, Delphi is an outstanding tool for production and together with Freepascal/Lazarus one of the best options for cross-platform application development - certainly on a par with C++/Qt. So this is a pretty smart move of Turkey to get some innovation going, and I expect great new end-user applications to come from Turkey during the next 10 years.
Professional programmers scoff at "old" languages like this, but they forget what it's like to not know the first thing about programming, or what GCC is, or how it's different from Clang, or if you need to install Linux to use it, or if you're making a huge mistake by using C++ instead of Rust, or if maybe Go is better, or why that one person said something about GraphQL, or if you need to install a virtual env for your python.
Delphi just installs with a double-click and you can write code in a box and it runs.
I use C++/C, Delphi, JS, Python. Also Java, C#, PHP and bunch of other but on and off basis. Here is my opinion
As a language Delphi/ObjectPascal is anything but ancient. It is kept up to date and has all the important features one would expect modern language to have sans garbage collection (well I actually consider this as advantage).
It produces fast native executables without any dependencies. It compiles with such speed that one can write shell scripts in it. It has the right balance between a mountain of complex features C++ has and something like Go. Its IDE is nice as well and full featured. Both language and the IDE exist in paid version supported by commercial vendor and as an opensource project in case of Lazarus/FreePascal. Sure there are some problems but show me the language that does not have any,
In my opinion the only REAL problems with the language/tools are all political. At some point these products were suffering from bad corporate governance and on top of that Microsoft went out of its way to actively destroy market for these in North America and along the way poached all leading developers from Borland including main language architect.
To make a conclusion I think that ObjectPascal along with the implementation is a good candidate for being used in many areas as generic well thought out language along with the IDE.
As for the article: I think it is a good move on Idera's side. To call it corruption is disingenuous I think. Many corporations are using the same tactic. It is friggin business.
Corruption matters aside, I honestly think choosing a non-standard technology is a good move. Reading the news article, you see that the students mentioned are in trade schools. Turkey needs the trade school students to continue doing trades (there's a shortage of tradespeople), so it would make no sense flooding the javascript/c#/python developer market with trade schoolers now thinking they might make lots of more money despite not having any training on software development. We already have enough lemons in the developer market as it is.
So if they learn Delphi, they can use some software automation to make their jobs easier, and they can easily learn another language if they turn out to be really good at this new thing. After learning an OOP language, learning a new one takes at most a week.
* New things are typically more popular than older things.
* People not using ObjectPascal / Delphi love to hate on it.
* People using it feel outraged at the injustice, pointing out it's merits.
I have been using Delphi for about 30 yrs it seems. I have a love / hate relationship with it. Love the language and the ability to rapidly get the program I want created. Hate that version after version, the IDE STILL has stupid bugs; that the built-in help seems to get worse and worse with time (I don't want a slow web browser showing me Microsoft C calls and all sorts of irrelevant nonsense), and get very annoyed when having to get required custom components installed before being able to open a project using the components. And I REALLY dislike that they charge so bloody much for it. For business reasons I had to purchase a license that cost a few thousand dollars. Like 2 weeks later, sales people were calling me encouraging me to spend a similar amount to upgrade to the newest version that had just come out. They must have only a handful of paying customers and depend on the few to keep their entire business afloat.
In the UK during the nineties we had old versions of Delphi distributed on magazine covers. Magazines then carried numerous tutorials over the years that helped people get started on their programming careers when school computing courses had lost their way with a focus on IT. Computing in schools in the UK with the BBC Micro had been much more useful as a basis for learning programming, something Eben Upton called out in his Raspberry PI keynote at PyCon a number of years ago.
I recall discussions with other students in my first year of uni about how they learned to program real things for family and businesses with these tools. Native and efficient Win16 and later Win32 (compared to VB runtime) programs were an exciting proposition in the 90s. Delphi could be used to create things that weren't as viable with VB. Personally, I chose C++ Builder for some reason (probably because I had heard about the industry use of C++), but even it had interesting facets, like the VCL compatibility with the Delphi toolset.
I was curious a little while ago whether Delphi or something similar was still available for modern computers (I think it followed from the same question about MS Access and VB6).
Idera (nee Borland) must be stoked, they potentially just created 1 million new Delphi programmers in a 2nd world country. I'd add a bullet point to the sheet.
* One million Turkish kids
This isn't necessarily corruption. And we have no idea what they paid. The internet is lousy in Turkey, having a stand alone system with documentation, an IDE and a great debugger will work really well in that environment. Pascal is a perfectly fine language.
In my universe they started using Racket and The New Turing Omnibus (for middle school) and then The Little ____ Books [2] and then on to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs [3]
Pascal isn't necessarily the worst choice to learn programming in. After all, it was designed from the ground up for education and Delphi is one of the few environments around sporting a vb-style GUI creation interface. In high school, when i could barely program i still managed to utilize delphi to run some physics calculations. I suppose Java or C# makes more sense at the college level. But below that when the vast majority arent going to be programmers and the goal is to get them an idea of what programming is about i could think of few superior choices, if any.
This is not BUY. It is an agreement to supply the students within the curricula of 12 different courses for students to apply the projects using Delphi. It also covers an agreement t provide monthly scholarships to successful students.
> Getting object-pascal back into universities and education is very important. Not just for Delphi as a product and Embarcadero as a company, but to ensure that the next generation of software developers are given a firm grasp on fundamental programming concepts; concepts that represent the building-blocks that all software rests on; a curriculum that has taken heavy damage from the adoption of Java and C# in the early 2K’s.
doesn’t sound very convincing. Not a Java fan at all and never used C# since AFAIK it’s mostly used in the Microsoft ecosystem (I heard very good things about it though), but what fundamental concepts can’t be taught in a Java & C# curriculum that can be with Delphi? The article unfortunately doesn’t expand on that.
Students will be taught a language they'll never ever use in real life. It was paid for although there're tons of free languages for every platform and every paradigm.
I guess someone from the government had just become significantly richer.
Everyone is assuming incompetence/familiarity with old tooling but it's also likely that this is a corruption/kickback scheme with some local distributor
[+] [-] arghwhat|6 years ago|reply
I then found out that they were being taught to use Borland Turbo C.
I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its all they know.
[+] [-] Andrew_nenakhov|6 years ago|reply
Whenever you wanted to know syntax of some command, you print this command, press ctrl-f1 and is presented with docs, complete with a working example. It was insanely great. Remember, stack overflow didn't exist then.
[+] [-] mamcx|6 years ago|reply
Miles ahead.
Pascal is what we need, but C is what we deserve. Billons of dollars wasted in it.
What it have bad is the massive mismanagement of the owners, and that translate to lack the influx of talent to it.
Note: I'm moderator in a Delphi forum and use it for years. I'm now in rust, and is great yet:
- Some of the problems that rust fix? Delphi too decades ago.
- Delphi still compile so fast. All the stupid c-based langs are turtles. Including LLVM. Is a sad joke that "I use C-/C++/rust" for performance and the compilers NOT PERFORM. Period.
- All the other currents langs on earth, all of them, still fail at build a GUI easily.
- Only recently, with Go and now rust, people rediscover the joy of easy deployment. Delphi have it decades ago.
Of curse Delphi is not perfect, and we the users know it. Sadly, in this industry worse is better and without a path to improve the lang you are at mercy of the owners. But like smalltalk, foxpro, hypercard and others, Delphi is a testament of what could be a decent lang/environment.
That the community at large still inflect itself with massive amounts of pain and billons of wasted effort with c/c++/js and still refuse to learn? Is something I will never understand.
P.D.2: If this sound like a rant? Yes. My super-duper machine is still compiling with rust and I'm frustrated, because this post remind me that this pain could be avoided...
[+] [-] vladsanchez|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvfjsdhgfv|6 years ago|reply
Now, a minority of us believe that desktop apps are really worth fighting for. They are fast, they give user control over their data, they can work offline, and the subscription model is optional rather than built in. Some in the mainstream would like this to be killed. Some companies like Apple approve it as long as they get their cut. But most simply don't care. If you don't want a future where everything you use is controlled by someone else, then the Turkish decision is not meaningless.
[+] [-] notyourday|6 years ago|reply
If the goal is to get more students to become programming literate, then the last thing that I would want is to pick a random flavor of the day language, with some frameworks, and some "best practices" debated to the oblivion on HN or Reddit. I would want all schools have a pretty standard system, with identical software that works identically because the goal of that software is to act as a pen and paper in a class. It needs to get out of the way.
Imagine the conversation had they picked C++ and do Linux. First, there's going to be a multi-year debate if we should be using Ubunto, Centos, Arch, until some pointy headed expert says "The future is in CoreOS!" just before everyone decides to standardize on Fedora. After that there would be a fight about versions, because everyone knows we should always run the latest. That's except for the group of people over there, that are refusing to run the latest and want to run the proven. Oh and they do not want to do C++, they hate C++ and say it should be Rust and since it is a Linux system and shadow IT is pretty easy on it, they are going to teach Rust! Or mostly argue about teaching Rust... etc... etc.. etc.
Here's a thing - if 10% of students gets out of the Delphi environment and starts messing with GCC for any reason then the program already succeeded in achieving the goal.
[+] [-] perfunctory|6 years ago|reply
A little bit too harsh. As the article points out Delphi is currently #12 on the TIOBE Index [0]. Above Go for example.
[0] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
[+] [-] h4l0|6 years ago|reply
5 or 6 years ago, our ex-minister, claimed that it is dangerous to work with computers since they can be challenging for the mind in a conference about cloud computing. Let that sink in.
[+] [-] clouddrover|6 years ago|reply
I wouldn't call Delphi ancient. It's not like they haven't been updating it. Delphi can target Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and Linux. It's pretty good:
https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi
[+] [-] blub|6 years ago|reply
Delphi is a modern development environment. I haven't used it recently, but it was incredible in the 90s/00s and I know it kept adding features and platforms. AFAIK Beyond Compare is built with Delphi.
[+] [-] adriantam|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zozbot234|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badsectoracula|6 years ago|reply
Delphi isn't ancient, if anything chances are some of the tools people use nowadays on Linux are older than Delphi.
[+] [-] anaganisk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fierarul|6 years ago|reply
If anything it should be mandatory to learn something else. It might be the only non-work programming language they will ever learn. Cradle to grave Python / Java?
Would Common Lisp / Haskell be considered a bad / good / ancient choice?
[+] [-] Phylter|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tristador|6 years ago|reply
Does anyone have a recommendation for a good, up to date, open source, introduction to programming? Ideally something that uses an experienced programmer (i.e. me) to guide.
[+] [-] beamatronic|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goatinaboat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] levosmetalo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdm85|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FpUser|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] MrGilbert|6 years ago|reply
It has pretty low entry barriers, and is pretty capable. When I used it (as a hobbiest, during Delphi 5 and Delphi 7 times), it had a superb tooling, and a really efficient compiler. Everything "just worked". It's now 15 - 20 years ago, when we created really tiny Windows exe files. A notepad.exe clone in only 23kb size - with no external dependencies at all, just using pure Windows32 API and Delphi. These where truely fun times.
Miss them some times.
[+] [-] Leace|6 years ago|reply
Another benefit was that it was possible to interoperate with low-level Win32 API and the enormous component library provided by third-party authors.
[+] [-] downandout|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbourke|6 years ago|reply
Cost being the obvious large one.
Every time I’ve had an inkling of interest in Delphi, I pop by the website and nope out within a few minutes after finding the pricing page.
[+] [-] throwaway8941|6 years ago|reply
It's not like we had an internet connection to learn from.
At least that's how I learned the difference between static and dynamic linking.
[+] [-] gwd|6 years ago|reply
Grammar note: "hobbyist". "-ist" is the suffix for, "A person who does this thing"; "-est" is the suffix for changing an adjective into a superlative: "Yours is hobby, his is hobbier, mine is the hobbiest."
[+] [-] Wiretrip|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h4l0|6 years ago|reply
I cannot think of a single positive reason behind this decision in 2020. All I can think of is that the people that came to this conclusion are the ones who graduated from Computer Science related studies in ~1998-2004~ and immediately got themselves in politics. I lost count of how many times have I heard that if you pay for it, it's just better...
Finally, I admit that I'm definitely highly biassed when it comes to Turkish Politics.
[+] [-] zwaps|6 years ago|reply
* You want to teach principles. Delphi allows you to teach OOP principles. You may or may not agree that OOP should be the starting paradigm, but that is at least a popular and conventional opinion.
* You don't want complexity. I am sure there are many alternatives that do things better. Heck, I am sure some Haskell guy will tell us itt how he can build a graphical interface in half a line of code. But remember these are kids who may not even understand what a program even is!
* You want results. In particular, it should be easy to create things like a user interface via the IDE. The fun about learning programming is to create something cool. Kids today most often use UI's and not terminals, and I think there is real value to allowing them to create something they might actually use. If you struggle through understanding your first program, and all it does is to print out "Hello World" on a black interface, it is somewhat underwhelming. But if you can use the IDE to create your custom "hello world" box with pink borders and a unicorn picture - well that's cool!
* Of course you want students to be able to transfer their skills to other languages. But that's arguably not a big issue with Pascal.
* Finally, you want it all in one package. If you have to learn a vast module infrastructure, it just complicates things. Here is your "language", you can do everything in it. I remember when we were learning, we started to try to build games and stuff. We used the tools available to use, because it was all very complex and we understood little. It was useful to have such a limited toolbox in the view of complexity. I think if we were forced to think about modules and many, many options to do a thing, we'd probably give up. Of course it is educational to try to come up with a solution with a limited set of tools!
From this perspective, Delphi is not a bad choice. Indeed I think the only other similar choice would be C#, which would probably cost more.
[+] [-] jonathanstrange|6 years ago|reply
However, Delphi is an outstanding tool for production and together with Freepascal/Lazarus one of the best options for cross-platform application development - certainly on a par with C++/Qt. So this is a pretty smart move of Turkey to get some innovation going, and I expect great new end-user applications to come from Turkey during the next 10 years.
[+] [-] mastry|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phendrenad2|6 years ago|reply
Delphi just installs with a double-click and you can write code in a box and it runs.
[+] [-] vortico|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FpUser|6 years ago|reply
As a language Delphi/ObjectPascal is anything but ancient. It is kept up to date and has all the important features one would expect modern language to have sans garbage collection (well I actually consider this as advantage). It produces fast native executables without any dependencies. It compiles with such speed that one can write shell scripts in it. It has the right balance between a mountain of complex features C++ has and something like Go. Its IDE is nice as well and full featured. Both language and the IDE exist in paid version supported by commercial vendor and as an opensource project in case of Lazarus/FreePascal. Sure there are some problems but show me the language that does not have any,
In my opinion the only REAL problems with the language/tools are all political. At some point these products were suffering from bad corporate governance and on top of that Microsoft went out of its way to actively destroy market for these in North America and along the way poached all leading developers from Borland including main language architect.
To make a conclusion I think that ObjectPascal along with the implementation is a good candidate for being used in many areas as generic well thought out language along with the IDE.
As for the article: I think it is a good move on Idera's side. To call it corruption is disingenuous I think. Many corporations are using the same tactic. It is friggin business.
[+] [-] _v7gu|6 years ago|reply
So if they learn Delphi, they can use some software automation to make their jobs easier, and they can easily learn another language if they turn out to be really good at this new thing. After learning an OOP language, learning a new one takes at most a week.
[+] [-] kdtop|6 years ago|reply
* New things are typically more popular than older things.
* People not using ObjectPascal / Delphi love to hate on it.
* People using it feel outraged at the injustice, pointing out it's merits.
I have been using Delphi for about 30 yrs it seems. I have a love / hate relationship with it. Love the language and the ability to rapidly get the program I want created. Hate that version after version, the IDE STILL has stupid bugs; that the built-in help seems to get worse and worse with time (I don't want a slow web browser showing me Microsoft C calls and all sorts of irrelevant nonsense), and get very annoyed when having to get required custom components installed before being able to open a project using the components. And I REALLY dislike that they charge so bloody much for it. For business reasons I had to purchase a license that cost a few thousand dollars. Like 2 weeks later, sales people were calling me encouraging me to spend a similar amount to upgrade to the newest version that had just come out. They must have only a handful of paying customers and depend on the few to keep their entire business afloat.
[+] [-] zerkten|6 years ago|reply
I recall discussions with other students in my first year of uni about how they learned to program real things for family and businesses with these tools. Native and efficient Win16 and later Win32 (compared to VB runtime) programs were an exciting proposition in the 90s. Delphi could be used to create things that weren't as viable with VB. Personally, I chose C++ Builder for some reason (probably because I had heard about the industry use of C++), but even it had interesting facets, like the VCL compatibility with the Delphi toolset.
[+] [-] taneq|6 years ago|reply
Turns out there's a free Delphi-compatible IDE called Lazarus: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
[+] [-] sitkack|6 years ago|reply
* One million Turkish kids
This isn't necessarily corruption. And we have no idea what they paid. The internet is lousy in Turkey, having a stand alone system with documentation, an IDE and a great debugger will work really well in that environment. Pascal is a perfectly fine language.
In my universe they started using Racket and The New Turing Omnibus (for middle school) and then The Little ____ Books [2] and then on to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs [3]
[1] https://racket-lang.org/
[2] http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/books.html
[3] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html https://github.com/sarabander/sicp
[+] [-] spaceplane|6 years ago|reply
This is how you transfer tax money to your cronies.
[+] [-] revanx_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timwaagh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akinbalcioglu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajuc|6 years ago|reply
It's simper, has fewer distracting features but covers all the important things, doesn't enforce too much boilerplate.
Unfortunately it's undead since like 10 years.
[+] [-] oefrha|6 years ago|reply
> Getting object-pascal back into universities and education is very important. Not just for Delphi as a product and Embarcadero as a company, but to ensure that the next generation of software developers are given a firm grasp on fundamental programming concepts; concepts that represent the building-blocks that all software rests on; a curriculum that has taken heavy damage from the adoption of Java and C# in the early 2K’s.
doesn’t sound very convincing. Not a Java fan at all and never used C# since AFAIK it’s mostly used in the Microsoft ecosystem (I heard very good things about it though), but what fundamental concepts can’t be taught in a Java & C# curriculum that can be with Delphi? The article unfortunately doesn’t expand on that.
[+] [-] anticodon|6 years ago|reply
I guess someone from the government had just become significantly richer.
[+] [-] yolobey|6 years ago|reply