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Borland Releases Kylix 2
Tal Cohen writes "Borland Kylix 2 is now available. Most new features are geared at Enterprise-level developers; the Open edition is still available for free download. The CLX (cross-platform component library) is covered under both GNU and Borland's license." The new features list is interesting - a fair number of buzzwords, but it also looks like they are supporting a lot of the new stuff. The white papers have some interesting topics - including gcc vs. Kylix.
that introduced the $49 IDE back in 84, and have consistently turned out more standards-compliant C++ compilers than you know who. And your tastes obviously don't count for much if they lead you to that opinion about Object Pascal. It's still considered by many one of the most advanced and elegant natively compiled languages around. OTOH Forte is certainly not considered the greatest IDE by many. But then again, those are YOUR tastes.
It has always been common knowledge that a key to Microsoft's dominance is making things easy for programmers so that they develop for the Windows platform. Is it just me has there been a real drop-off of interest by developers in all things Microsoft?
.Net and C#. Surely with Windows being the dominant platform, and .Net being Microsoft's new technical strategy, you'd expect some excited discussion about it amongst developers, but it's just not happening.
I remember there was a time about five years ago when most developers wouldn't even consider developing for anything other than Windows technologies and developer's magazines reflected that. These days, however, I see very little excitement about Microsoft technologies, for instance, I don't see lot of enthusiasm amongst developers about
This is just a feeling I have, and I have been trying to think of a way to quantify it, if nothing else to prove to myself that this sea-change is actually occurring and not just because I now take my information from different sources. The simple metric I have come up with is this - the number of times a word occurs on Google:
Linux - 30,100,000
Microsoft - 20,100,000
This crude metric seems to suggest that Linux has 10m more pages than all of Microsoft's products put together. Seeing as Microsoft has such a dominant position in the desktop space and is still much more of a household name than Linux, I think this is quite a clear demonstration that there is a lot more material about Linux out there than about Microsoft's products.
This came as a suprise:
"Linus Torvalds" - 640,000
"Bill Gates" - 649,00
I would have expected Bill Gates (who's a household name) to occur a lot more than Linus.
This is also suprising:
"Internet Explorer" - 2,730,000
Mozilla - 2,730,000
"Linux developer" - 20,600
"Windows developer" - 12,200
Is it just me, or do these figures suggest that Microsoft should be very worried indeed?
> And just what is wrong with Pascal?
:= for assign? Just give me the dam equal sign already! :)
Not trolling or meaning to start a "holy war", as this is just a personal opinion:
- Declarations are backwards, due to the awkward grammer: name type
Compared to the more logical C/C++ way: type name
- The distinction between functions and procedures (the language sports an artifical difference.) The lack of parenthesis in the declaration make it difficult to quickly visually spot functions.
- Operators, or the lack of them (no bit shifts, scope operator, namespaces?) i.e.
- Too wordy. { } are don't clutter my code whitespace, like 'begin' 'end' do.
In short, I just hate how the language looks.
It's the same as a person liking one spoken language over another. Sure they both can explain concepts, but which one is more compact, and is "fluent" for the person?
Pascal is a great teaching language, and Delphi is very impressive (Borland has always had lightning fast compiles on their Pascal languages, due to the grammar.) But I'd rather take a language I hate less (C/C++) then one that gives me a grammer that I hate (Pascal & sons.)
I like the multiparadigm support of C++.
i.e. procedural, object orientated, and generic programming paradigms.
For me, Pascal++ is just plain wrong, but if you're productive at using it, hey, more power to you!
Cheers