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Delphi Renaissance
bongo69 writes "The TIOBE Programming Community Index is reporting that Delphi is experiencing a revival, this coincides with Borland recently releasing Delphi 2005 allowing users to target both win32 and .net platforms, which to some, is a welcome alternative for .net developers reluctant to use Microsoft Visual Studio or the opensource alternative SharpDevelop."
http://lazarus.freepascal.org/
.net but it does support windows linux and (just about) mac os x
ok so it doesn't support microsofts
Which makes it harder to write bad code. PLus, it's Borland. Borland, IMHO, writes better compilers than MS, and better libraries too.
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Pascal is a bit verbose... but Borland's Object Pascal is a great fit for event driven apps that have to talk to databases.
For this particular type of application, Delphi is great. For example - you can get a pointer when you need to, but you don't have to drown yourself with them all the time.
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I'm sure that there is going to be a bunch of Delphi bashing posts but Delphi was one of the first truly great object-oriented development environments (the other might be IBM's VisualAge). It allowed for rapid layout of forms with the power of OO components. And the language, although not loved by many, is consistent and just as powerful as Java. The component library was also second to none.
For once, Delphi has supported RAD (what people now think makes .Net great) for ages and in many ways are still far superior to .Net.
For developing Desktop applications there isn't a better suited development tool.
It also has an incredibly rich third-party component market:
http://www.devexpress.com and http://www.remobjects.com are some of the best.
Why not try it out? Delphi 2005 Architect is available for trial download at http://www.borland.com
I don't know (or care) about .NET, but if you are
writng a windows program Delphi is staggeringly more
efficient to develop in than C++. You can also use it to do Windows API stuff efficiently, meaning you can write most of your custom controls in delphi itself without have to resort to C++.
I just wish they could get their act together and make better documentation.
I actually used C++ for many years before finding out about Delphi, but now that I've switched there is no way I would ever go back.
Of course, more efficient development is not in the best interests of most programmers, because they are motivated to drag out projects as long as possible for job security reasons. But when you are doing fixed-bid contracts, or even if you just care about your reputation, Delphi is the way to go.
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I would say that SharpDevelop is one of the best Free-As-In-Beer environments for you to learn how to write software in C#. Download the ECMA docs for the specification and try to write a few programs, and it works out pretty well. Certainly much better than trying to write something with a text editor and trying to compile by command-line when everything else you may have is done through a GUI environment. Get the C# How-to books if you don't have access to them anyway.
I happen to be a Delphi developer as well, and my #1 complaint about Sharp Develop is that they use the Visual Studio environment as the model for how user interaction should take place. It isn't bad, but moving between Delphi and #Develop can be a bit of a paradyme shift that is uncomfortable. For those who are VS fans, it would be a much more familiar environment (like the windowing stuff and location of help files, etc.)
The GUI end is a little bit clunky, but it is getting better. The first time I tried #Develop the menu editor was so buggy that it crashed the package. It has been showing significant improvement over time, and is remarkably stable now for some fairly serious GUI development. They bootstrapped the development with Visual Studio, but I believe that #Develop is self-compiling now (the editor can be edited with itself).
The part of getting it to work with Mono is a big deal, and the only real reason that it doesn't self-compile in Mono is because Mono lacks the GUI support necessary to get it to work. This is being worked on, and with #Develop getting stable there is now a larger push to get it working in Mono on Windows (and yes, Linux too). It would be terrific if you could get true cross-platform development going for a GPL'ed GUI development environment.
The person who originally wrote Turbo Pascal, and was also largely responsible for Delphi, led the C# design team.