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Slacker007 wrote: Delphi is primarily used still for legacy apps.
Yeah, that's what I thought too. That's definitely the situation where I work.
Also, it is interesting to me, because the MFC was far better than Borland stuff (IMO), but you certainly are not going to see a new book released on developing with MFC. And there are a lot of MFC devs around. Maybe more than Delphi. Maybe not.
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MFC was better than Borland OWL, by far. But not even close to Delphi. Delphi was VB done right (with component developers, users, and extenders all using the same tools/language), but too late to steal the market. Delphi was/is all the power of a full blown native language, with a lightning fast single pass compiler, inline assembler, and easy access to the entire Windows API. It has(had?) built in OLE compatible reference counting and interfaces for simple memory management (without the cost of garbage collection).
I was the first person to ever ship a commercial application written (partially) in Delphi (I was at Borland at the time, and got special dispensation to ship using a pre-release version of Delphi, otherwise Delphi would have been the first). After leaving Borland, I used Delphi to build many commercial systems, and the productivity it brought to the team significantly outweighed the learning curve (I particularly appreciated that moving old C programmers to Delphi helped them to learn and write true Object Oriented code, which migrating to C++ would not have done).
There are still things I like about Delphi better than .NET (like the way fields are modeled for SQL), but as I've been working for Microsoft for the last 15 years, I've come to appreciate a lot about .NET (Although I still have quite a bit of old Delphi code sitting on my home computer, I also have not been able to use Delphi for quite a while, so my experience is quite dated  ). But I would certainly give it a good look if I left Microsoft and was looking for something cross platform (although .NET Core is doing a pretty good job in that space now from my limited viewpoint).
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That's a great story and reminds me of a friend I worked with at a local computer shop back in 1992. He called Microsoft Office vapor-ware and always lauded the fantastic abilities of Borland Paradox (database that I'm sure you remember). He was right too.
Borland had a better Office before Microsoft, but MS knew how to say, "but just wait, when we get there you going to see something...."
Anyways, really great story and I believe you about it being better than VB. 
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not true,
there are still new projects started in Delphi today.
Yes the number of users is much less then c# that is true, but as happend so often it's not always the best technology that makes it...
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Delphi.7.Solutions wrote: there are still new projects started in Delphi today.
nothing to write home to mother about, though.
I have not seen active job placements, recruitments or hiring for Delphi positions in over 10 years in my area.
I used to though, and that is part of my point. Delphi is dying, whether you agree with the world on that or not.
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Kind of nonsense. It is neither dead nor dying, nor are only legacy apps developed in Delphi. Or Object Pascal in general (including FreePascal & Lazarus here)...
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Well, not sure what is so confusing here.
Just check the comments to the article you are linking to.
TIOBE is utter nonsense by itself. Having nonsense like "Groovy" or even Objective-C ahead of it shows that rather clearly. The "popularity" is a rather hard to measure factor, specially when considering the real world rather than wishful thinking...
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This is also due to Embarcadero's pricing, I'm sure. Delphi/C++ Builder used to be affordable as hobbies tools when Borland owned them. Not so much any more.
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ajhampson wrote: This is also due to Embarcadero's pricing, I'm sure
Yes, indeed. I understand their pain though. They could cut prices and gain some users but would they gain more than they lost? With a language in Delphi's position now it would be debatable.
So they press on with sky-high pricing, knowing that at some point they will lose a critical mass of developers. One can only presume that the owners are pocketing as much of the income as they can while it's still coming in.
I've never done any Delphi projects but I have always liked what I saw with Delphi and I think the world is better with it in it than without it. But, sadly, I know that one say it will go away (and it being cheaper would not necessarily prevent this).
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raddevus wrote: Are people out there still using Delphi?
I know many of them.
Personally, I can't stand Pascal syntax.
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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For it's time, Pascal was pretty good - way better than the other "pointer based" language that was big at the time: Algol (C didn't come out until two years after Pascal, and took more years to gain real traction). Yes, COBOL had pointers, but ... 
The problem is that Pascal is nearly 50 years old, and really shows it's age when you compare it to modern languages, though it's been extended pretty well over the years.
I don't use it - C# these days!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Pascal is good. It's syntax is ugly, though.
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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May be ugly, but you never accidentally assigned something in an if condition.
:= All day long. The one thing I truly miss about Delphi.
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated.
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Assignment is the most used operator in procedural programming. Choosing a two characters sequence for assignment and just a single character for comparison is rather unfortunate.
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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Yeah,
I really LOVE the JS approach of =, ==, ===, ==== (I hope I didn't miss a comparison,
I forget which one means the left side is equal, in context, but not of type, against a mutated version of the Right Hand Side... LOL)
The := jams me up when I switch between other languages, admittedly.
But I will argue that the "." is the most used, as in
sVal := dsCustomer.FieldByName('Value').AsString;
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Kirk 10389821 wrote: sVal := dsCustomer.FieldByName('Value').AsString;
I've not written 'procedural' by chance. 
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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COBOL pointers 
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Let's not go there - some of us will have eaten recently ...
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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05 WS-POINTER-VAR USAGE IS POINTER. 
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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%%%%%%
%%%% = =
%%C >
_)' _( .' ,
__/ |_/\ " *. o
/` \_\ \/ %`= '_ .
/ ) \/| .^',*. ,
/' /- o/ - " % '_
/\_/ < = , ^ ~ .
)_o|----'| .` '
___// (_ - (\
///-( \' \\
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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lol
I was unaware of that...
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Some later versions of Algol (maybe W and 68R / 68S ?) could emulate pointers but they weren't a feature of 58 or 60. The nearest Algol-60 came to pointers were 'thunks' - functions passed as parameters, which 'modern' languages think that they invented. C is notorious for pointers.
I found Pascal cumbersome - so many meanings of the word END. It's only useful feature was ATFs (anonymous tag fields). Admittedly, my experience of it was mostly porting the P-Code compiler and optimising its expression evaluators.
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Well, you're answer shows that you haven't had a look at current Pascal for at least 30 years...
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Deplhi... ok it is Pascal, never used it. But you can use the same environment with c++ Builder (since more than 20 years).
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