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Is Linux Ready For Delphi? -- Delphi R&D Answers
Chrismo writes: "Danny Thorpe, Sr. R&D Engineer at Borland, has written a great article addressing "some of the commonly expressed fears, misconceptions, and even misplaced euphoria" heard from the Delphi community since the announcement of their move to support Linux with their development tools."
Is that Delphi being available for Linux might actually spur the sales of their Windows product quite a bit.
At this point, more savvy IT departments are aware of Linux, but the common perception is that "it's not ready yet" (or is it "we're not ready yet"?). But, even out on the horizon, the existence of alternative environments has to cast some doubt on the typical Windows Standard Environment policy in place at most shops.
So, when a large internal RAD project comes down the pipe, even if 100% of the clients are currently Windows systems, Delphi may look like a better choice than Visual Basic simply because Borland is willing to consider popular non-Windows platforms. It at least gives you long term options -- in 2002, you'd hate to be the person to tell the CIO that Linux on the desktop is impossible because your department has just completed two million dollars of VB development -- a much worse problem than some poorly converted DOC files.
I'd expect there will be quite a few "We get along fine with gcc and vi, thank you." posts, but keep in mind this move isn't really about you. It's about the people on the S curve the author talked about (who probably care as much about you as you care about them), and my guess that in the short term, it's really about providing a more attractive product to their Windows customers.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I am VB programmer... despite the bad publicity the language gets, I was born and raised on GW-Basic, and then moved to VB way back in the old Win16 days. Now, I'm doing more and more (non-programming) work in Linux, but I can't start developing for it because I am too lazy to learn C++ when I can do a bloody good job in VB.
I think that it's great that Delphi(Object Pascal) is being ported to Linux -- how about an open-source version of a basic language so folks like me can start developing? With an open source Object Basic tool I would start porting my programs like crazy -- as would a million other VB programmers.
Before dismissing me completely, just consider that not everyone has to be a "programmer" to generate a lot of decent results in an Object Basic type langauge.
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
As a long-time Linux user, and a recent religious convert to the ways of Delphi (having, wrongly, abandoned my old faithful Turbo Pascal skills when Windows 3.0 came along in favor of C/C++, which was a *HUGE* mistake because I'd written about 3 million lines of Turbo Pascal code during the late 80's/early 90's), I am totally ready for Linux Delphi.
Delphi rocks, as a RAD tool. There really isn't much out there for Windows that can compare - Delphi *ACTUALLY* made Windows programming fun again - specifically the extremely well-designed VCL.
Prior to Delphi, Windows suffered the same fundamental problem that Linux currently does, at least for me anyway, which is that there are a large number of API's, and multiple different ways of doing things, from a developer standpoint.
The Delphi VCL changed all of that for me as a developer who cares about getting things done fast, as rock solid as possible - it encapsulates a lot of the dreck that is the Windows GUI API, and makes it productive.
Now, I'm not saying that Linux is the same - certainly, the GNOME/KDE efforts are very well designed projects, but there is still a last-step of organization that is required to make RAD a reality for those GUI environments, and I sincerely hope that Delphi can bring that into the Linux mix. Either way, Linux will still be a great platform to deploy apps on, and I use it every day regardless - its just that the Delphi way of doing RAD is going to make for a *huge* shift in developer focus away from such mundane things as library dependence, text-based GUI design, towards rapid application development.
And, since Linux needs apps, rapid app development can only be a good thing.
When I can use Delphi to build apps on Linux, I will ditch whatever last vestiges of control Microsofts operating systems have over my current development environment/requirements, and happily be a full-time Linux developer. Right now, I'm *forced* to use Windows as a client software deployment platform, because Delphi makes Windows programming so damned fast...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
This is a must read for all Linux zealots. I tried to say something along these lines in a post to yesterdays Delphi article, but I did not put the same thought and effort into it as this guy did.
This article is important for Linux freaks to read because this is how the rest of the world outside of the community looks at Linux. They community has trouble understanding that the world doesn't care about open/closed, MS/RH, or any other opposed forces. If you want Linux to be big, this article shows the path to it being a huge success with the other 99.9997% of the world.
- I like pudding.