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Borland Announces the Return of the Turbo Products, with Video
Leonel writes "Borland Software's Developer Tools Group just announced the return of the Turbo line of products. With free and cheap versions, it's aimed at students, hobbyist developers, occupational developers and individual programming professionals. More information is available at the the Turbo Explorer website, including a video of the Adventures of TurboMan."
How can I be funny on the internet?
Well they have added C# to the family too.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
it's aimed at students, hobbyist developers, occupational developers and individual programming professionals. More information is available at the the Turbo Explorer website, including a video of the Adventures of TurboMan.
The adventures of TurboMan? Just to confirm, we are talking about college students, not elementary school, right?
I started with Borland Turbo C++. :-)
And this is a problem because? Have you seen the current incarnation of the Delphi/Object Pascal language?
Borland-Inprise-Borland, had the market and gave it away. I was an avid Turba Pascal user byt with Eclipse, KDevelope and Visual Studio who really cares any more what Borland does...
Do these still need two 5.25" floppy drives to run? I'm not sure I remember where mine are.
Last night, I was digging around on the Borland site to see if there was such a thing as this, and today they announce it. How's that for a co-incidence!
:)
I'll certainly be interested to look at these though. Free things are ALWAYS good
Me too.
I still keep a copy of Borland C++ 3.1 (the last DOS version).
It was an awesome IDE, very productive.
Good old days.
(Not that today is less bright, Vim/gcc/gdb has it all, too.)
factor 966971: 966971
TurboProducts return!
With 80% more standards non-compliance.
I learned to program on a dos version of TurboC ... To this day I still prefer the yellow on blue text :)
Interesting that the Borland tools are being released close to the end of the free year of MS's Express line (ending in Nov. I believe). Could Borland be preparing to take on the MS developer tool chain again?
/.) tool chain. It'll be fun to see if Borland can bring anything new and unique to compete with the VS Express Editions.
Considering that Visual Studio is a highly evolved (I know, this is ALWAYS open for debate on
At the time, Borland (or maybe Watcom) had the best C++ compilers. They also had a wonderfully designed library in the form of TurboVision for doing console applications with menus and windows. However, time has passed, GCC is a damned fine compiler and Qt is a superb UI framework (et al). If Borland wanted to join in this game they should have open sourced their compiler a long time ago. Too little, too late I'm afraid.
It's a shame really, Borland were my favourite company, then Philip Kahn left, they changed their name to Inprise and all their top developers went to Microsoft.
Carpe Daemon
Could be really nice having another commercial Windows C++ IDE around. At my workplace we really need an alternative to Visual Studio. In a codebase that's nearly 1,000,000 lines intellisense is insanely slow, completely inaccurate, and honestly just plain annoying. Visual studio randomly crashes, etc. We're in the process of switching to CMake so people can use Eclipse or whatever IDE they want, but Eclipse's CDT is still a bit too young for my tastes. Perhaps Borland's IDE will provide a welcome reprieve and nice debugging.
And I still avoid microsofts line like the plague. Its good to see the Turbo brand back.
I would imagine that Borland hopes to boost sales of its higher end lines by giving away the cheap ones and hooking the developers, but they'd better have some super-sweet bait on the end of the hook. There are tons of powerful IDE's, many free. Unless they bring something to the table that is lacking in other products, I can't see them reaching their business objectives.
People are beginning to expect the IDE to be free. Oracle knows this, so does Sun.
Best of luck to Borland. I have fond memories all the way back to Borland C++ 3.x for Windows, and Delphi - ESPECIALLY Delphi.
Delphi ain't your father's Pascal. It's a modern, object-oriented interoperable language. The main advantage isn't the language itself, but the class library (VCL) and the form designer, which is the best tool around to build user interfaces (ask Skype), while still having the ability of having your code neatly encapsulated in classes separated from the presentation layer.
.Net offerings. if that's your language of choice, you can use C++ with the VCL (or for plain WinAPI applications, if you feel inclined).
Anyway, Delphi is only half of the picture here. There's Turbo C++ and C# offerings along with the native Delphi and Delphi for
Basically, the explorer versions are advanced IDEs for these languages, free of change, allowing commercial development. There's your motivation.
I don't see Turbo Prolog anywhere. Nor Turbo Pascal.
It's the Turbo line without the Turbo products.
Is it yet-another-PR-stunt-baby?
Does the "New Borland" run on Mac OS X? Or do we have to wait for "Borland Classic" to come out?
Don't get me wrong. I love the Borland of yester-year, but are Borland tools relevant anymore?
With all the free goodies available, development on most platforms can be done without spending a dime.
Just off the top of my head, things like GCC, Xcode, and Eclipse come to mind.
OS X, Linux, Tivo, Amiga, my fascination with cult-like technologies would intrigue any psychiatrist.
Sounds like the visual studio express editions, though I am not complaining, visual studio express sukz ass compared to the professional especially for c++.
Are these available for download?
I can't see any working download link on the site.
Or is it a firewall or browser compatibility problem?
factor 966971: 966971
Pascal was/is a great learning language. It's not too difficult to comprehend, but it's strong enough that you don't immediately exceed it's capabilities once you "get it."
:= (1 - Expenses / Revenue); ). There's competition now, and most machines owned by hobby-programmers and students will cruise through the compilation process fast enough that the "turbo" brand doesn't offer a compelling solution like it used to. There are OSS solutions available, so the "less expensive" compulsion is gone as well. Back in the day (man, y'all are making me feel old ...) the alternative was the Microsoft compiler that was dog slow and required a manual linking step ... from the command line ... both ways.
... now get the hell off my lawn!
Turbo Pascal was a great because a) it was inexpensive compared to everyone else; and b) it compiled soooo much faster than everyone else. The development environment concept was pretty innovative too, and eliminated much of the command line funkiness. Funny, I didn't Turbo Pascal in the press release - Delphi, C++, C#. I guess you could call Delphi "object Pascal" if you wanted to.
However, this press release stinks of a marketing cash-grab where they try to make a quick buck by squeezing the legacy heritage of a well-known trademark. I just don't see that they're adding any value to the proposition. Some marketroid probably did the math based on "no new development NRE" and was brimming at the huge potential margins on such a re-release (i.e. Margin
Tell Blaise that I still have fond memories
My enterprise was based on Borland C++ in the last 10 years.
But this seems to be the last desperate ad before the collapse: the feature list contains no news at all - all of it should have been in Borland IDEs years ago.
Instead of chewing new buzzwords, the daily used tools should have been cleaned up first: Borland C++ Builder 6 behaves terribly even on medium size projects, (crashes, tons of bugs, etc.)
If Borland had a yearly update, I would be their greatest fun.
If Kylix would have been developed further, I would pay for it, because we need cross-platform Linux tools...
So many dead tools...
Nothing to see here, man, move away... to Qt, for example.
It is today's Borland. And shines.
But because it provides a steady release cycle, people will buy it, even if it is pricey.
These days Borland Developer Studio gives me time to make some coffee.
BUT .Net 1.1? Seriously? We've been at 2.0 for some time now, right? Did Borland just miss that announcement?
The adventures of TurboMan? Just to confirm, we are talking about college students, not elementary school, right?
Yes, let's be certain of that age group. More comic books are purchased by adults than elementary school-age children.
I think it's overdue, the return of the turbo packages. Microsoft's .net suite is a nightmare.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
FTA:
"the company's Developer Tools Group, WHICH IS UP FOR SALE, is scheduled to announce single-language versions of the components of Borland Developer Studio..."
The "up for sale" bit tells me that what they are doing is trying to drive some good press, boost their stock price a bit, and negotiate a higher selling price.
Like most has-been corporations, they refuse to accept that they are obsolete and out of the running, so they would rather simply inflate their stock prices artifically so they can walk away with a nice chunk of change ans say, "see we didn't fail!" All I can say is, at least they didn't inflate theirs like SCO did!
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Next : World announces to Borland that nobody cares anymore about what they do.
The Microsoft People have Visual Studio. The Java people have Eclipse/NetBeans. The OSS people have gcc, perl and whatnot.
Nobody needs Borland anymore.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
I suppose this is a commendable attempt to turn around a too-long tradition of increasingly high prices for increasingly low-quality products, but it might have been better to release a high-quality product, first. Even Delphi 2006, where they actually took quality seriously for the first time this century, has had two service packs and a double handful of "hot fixes" since it was released.
.NET) and now the productivity edge lies with C# and .NET, not Delphi and it's tired old VCL.
But look at what they're giving away, and you may wonder if free is still too expensive. A simple C# "static void Foo()" becomes "class procedure Foo; static;" In the name of not breaking a handful of code (ie, avoiding a modest, one-time pain for that tiny handful of developers who used "static" as an identifier) they inflict on-going pain on all developers. Not a good design decision!
I wish them luck - they'll need it. Time was when Turbo Pascal and Delphi were real productivity boosters, a Windows programmer's secret weapon. But Delphi stagnated while Borland put all their effort into poorly-executed ports (to Linux, and then to
Sounds like an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
(Delphi) Pascal, C++, and C#.
Tell me when they bring back TurboProlog...
That is all.
I used Delphi, Builder, and Visual Studio - and I found Borland's intellisense much less responsive than the one in the Microsoft IDE.
Although I use it with not-that-complex projects, in my case the difference between speed is evident: it takes forever for the list of relevant options to show up in Borland's IDEs, while in VS the speed at which it shows up and can be used is the same, even after the project grows in complexity.
The saddest poem
Borland was EXTREMELY popular back in the day. They could have OWNED the dev tools space completely. At some point they got too carried away with MBA-related activities, such as branding, enterprise fads du jour, etc and they lost their userbase and fucked up their products. I have used Delphi and C++ Builder extensively. 6-7 years back there was NO decent RAD alternative. The best thing about them was you could drop all the way to the bare metal at any time if you wanted to and you could have RAD capabilities if you needed to deliver stuff quickly.
I feel for Borland, but at this point I think they should fold up their tent and die. They're beyond any hope of recovery, thanks to retarded management and marketing.
Your motivation? How is productivity as a motivation?
Delphi has been my tool of choice for the last 11 years. It remains the
most productive development tool I have used.
Agile processes? Well, the build on a Delphi project is so quick, you
don't have time to fill your coffee cup, much less drink it. So build/test
cycles are fast.
The language is powerful, and a great foundation for those who choose to
move to C#. The learning curve on C#, coming from Delphi, is pretty shallow.
But please, stay with your g++, and those glacially slow builds. I don't
need more competition.
--- Bill
Wow -- what an impressive display of negativity!
I'm sure this product is great, but what is going to attract developers to these IDEs, especially the C# IDE when Microsoft is already giving away Visual Studio Express for free. Although it is lacking some of the features of the full version of Visual Studio for hobbiests and students, the market Borland seems to be trying to attract, these tools are great and free. I think Borland already missed their opportunity here
I love to deploy my packages
We want Brief (remember UnderWare?) back!
The best programmers editor evar! Globsub in a column-marked block? No problemo!
Open source it!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Turbo Explorer editions are free, and have a complete, professional level feature set.
Is TurboMan related to Johnny Turbo, by any chance?
You must think in Russian.
I thought that too, but then I double-checked Microsoft's FAQ: Effective April 19th, 2006, all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions are free permanently. This pricing covers all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions including Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, Visual J#, and Visual Web Developer as well as all localized versions of Visual Studio Express.
:)
We'll see if they ever update it, though.
But yeah, this sounds like Borland is trying to compete with MS tools. Good for them! I'm all for companies giving a hand to folks who want to learn their tools... especially if we get free stuff out of the deal.
I produce electronic music and write little games. Have a look.
I loved turbo pascal (18 years ago). I wish they have some sort of turbo java.
It's not "pascal", it's "Objcet Pascal". Even your link to wikipedia proves this. Major differences between the two (kinda like saying Java is just C). -shnar
"...students, hobbyist developers, occupational developers and individual programming professionals..."
May I suggest Code::Blocks?
Has it changed any since version 6? I'm still supporting several apps written in that version, and the VCL libraries are IMHO a complete mess.
That said, I'm still hooked on it for cost reasons, it is so much faster and cheaper to develop windows apps in Delphi Pascal than in VC++. Of course, these days, I believe the debate has moved on.
Serious, question, not a troll, is it worth upgrading to the latest?
I still use ctrl-insert and shift-insert for copy and paste. Hard habit to break.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Does it still use pascal's weird funky operators chosen simply to be different from other languages?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
But some improvements could still possibly qualify for the "turbo" moniker:
My RSS reader thinks the title is "Borland Announces the Return of the Turbo Prod." Since when are they in the cattle herding business?
Can I produce binaries that I can distribute for free, or are we hamstrung and have to purchase the pro version???
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
... shame on me. Third time the charm? Not a chance.
No way I'm going back to Borland for dev tools.
In the late 80's, Turbo Pascal for the Mac was bug-ridden and behind on Mac system call support. A tech support call revealed they knew about it, and didn't care. The tech said that their sales were roughly half the number of copies in use, and it didn't pay for them to continue developing.
In the early 90's, after learning Paradox DOS at a customer request, Paradox Windows came out claiming upward compatibility... but it turned out to be only of the data. Not even a compatibility mode for DOS screens and procedures. Worthless. It was easier to move the customer to Foxpro!
So what's the benefit of Borland free toolkits?
I've got GNU C++
I've got FOSS scripting languages (Perl, Ruby, Python) coming out my ears.
I've got Microsoft's "Explore" versions of Visual Studio, also free
I've got Java with lots of free dev tools if I really cared
No sir, no Borland for me.
Design for Use, not Construction!
I'm actually a *new* Delphi developer. I've only begun using Delphi within the last 3 months, and I'll be honest, I fought using it tooth and nail. I was so certain that C# was so much better in every situation that I wouldn't even consider Delphi. However, we began doing development for some apps that would be run in WinPE, and I decided to fire up Delphi 2006 and give it a whirl.
I was blown away. I created my application in less than 3 days (minus user testing) --- but the best part is that my app was *fast*. Nearly as fast as if it was written in C/C++. My app was moderately complex (or at least not of the 'hello world' variety), performing user authentication via SOAP connection, connectivity to SQL database and record inserts, XML parsing, and multiple forms.
I have to admit, being able to code Win32 with drag/drop components that just work is refreshing. All without a framework or DLL runtime requirement. I am a Delphi convert, and plan to continue using Delphi to develop Win32 apps. However, I'm not a zealot and I know that C# has it's place and I plan to continue using it where it makes sense.
The more tools that a developer can have in their toolbox, the better.
The VCL has evolved a bit, but no major architectural changes. The IDE has evolved a lot, with large changes. At first sight, some people like the new IDE and some people don't - but eventually everyone sees it's a lot better.
The main enhacements are code productivity tools - refactorings, integrated unit tests, and some new language features. D2006 produces much faster binaries as well.
I'd say yeah, it's worth upgrading. Try the trial version before to make sure.
The Delphi 2006 win32 compiler is an improvement, and the IDE is considerably better than version 6. I upgraded myself and a few months ago for the first time since Delphi 6 and am quite happy with that side of the purchase.
.net support if for version 1.1, which sucks big time. I fail to see any reason to use Borland Studio on an old version of .net when Visual Studio is on 2.0. Indeed I feel more than a little cheated that I had to pay for all the .net stuff to get my hands on the win32 compiler.
.net 2.0 support, but beyond that, unless NewCo manages to up their game, I suspect I will go elsewhere.
However the
I've used Delphi since version 1.0, and Turbo Pascal before that, so Borland have a long legasy of goodwill from me. However they are in last-chance saloon now. I'll probably upgrade to 2007 when it arrives to get
Cool! I've missed that Turbo button.
I don't get it. Why does everyone want new tools all the time. Windows is still windows, A button is still a button and the communication protocols are supported accross the development platforms.
.net platform leaves them with very little working power. There all stressed and tearing their hair out when a server spits blood because they can't see inside!
I have been working with Delphi since version 3 and still tackle new projects today with Delphi 6 (Don't want the newer and slower Visual Studio lookalike IDE).
Here at work I am cracking up lauging these days. Most of the dev team have moved to gadget-land using Visual Studio and C#. As a result they need to upgrade all the dev machines (Again) and find out that the resources sucked up by the bloatware
In the mean time our old and trusty properly hand coded applications keep scaling up on ever more powerful hardware showing there is many more years of use in the old and proven.
I believe I am more productive using Delphi today than a whole line up of fancy Microsoft fanboy developers because I have access to absolutely amazing free library source code build and refined by users over the years. A massive Delphi and Windows API knowledge base indexed by Google newsgroups, a solid grounded knowledge of my tools and libraries and last but not least a very supportive Delphi user base.
I hope this Turbo initiative will bring more developers to their senses and start coding again instead of playing with shiny black box Microsoft crap.
This is a good thing. The 'turbos' were a great learning tool back then, and rather useful too. Now that they are being brought back and updated to more modern systems, all i can say its its nothing but good..
Many of us first learned 'modern' languages with those products..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've been expecting Borland to go away for years. I was surprised when Metrowerks imploded and got burned there (no good replacement on Mac, still) and I hate to risk it again, but....
.NET crap.) CPPB 5 is still a decent system for throwing stuff together quickly. It's quirky & buggy, to say the least, and has the absolute worst text editor I've ever seen, but it built standalones then better than MS can now and decent editors aren't hard to find. This may be a chance to get "modernized" (even if cut down) versions without having to sell a kid or two.
I have C++ Builder 5 & Delphi 6 (the last good versions of both: upgrading was a lot of $ for worthless
The (free?) Explorer versions seem only to lack Control creation and IDE extensibility (maybe adding Controls to toolbars?) In my experience w/ CPPB 5:
- building your own droppable controls is so difficult and so hard to get right (abominably documented and not working at all out of the box: even the wizard code doesn't compile) that I stopped trying: I put placeholders on the forms and create my own controls in code. I won't miss that feature at all.
- I have no desire to extend any IDE (EMACS is wasted on me) and I really don't care if I can't add 3rd party controls to toolbars (i.e., it's not worth paying for.) VCL controls are much better than ActiveX (which I have totally banned from our products, even if source is available), but it's still rare that they're a real win, once you get them installed and work around the inevitable bugs and missing features.
Worth a download! VC++ Express is very usable on my XP laptop (2003 won't install at all; Express took 5 tries but works now.) If this works out it will be great for small projects.
I started using Delphi a bit late in the game. A few years ago I chose Delphi 6 because it looked pretty decent and I liked the way it simplified the Win32 API in such a way that we could get to developing software without too much hassle. Delphi 7 came along which I passed over because I wanted to wait for Delphi 8 and jump on the .NET bandwagon. When Delphi 8 came out I bought it...
.NET haters who constantly preach about how they don't use dot garbage and claim that native code is the best. My reply to those people is that if you don't understand the advantages of .NET over native code then you have no business writing software.
... again.
... which was the biggest mistake I ever made. Delphi 8 was a such a POS I was shocked that people actually released software that bad. Like they say in Southpark, "You see, I learned a lesson today..." and boy did I learn it good.
Ever since then Borland has been spiralling downwards into oblivion. Their best engineers walked out causing them to lag behind never being able to catch up again. Delphi 2005 was a POS and Delphi 2006 needed a couple patches before it actually worked. I never even bothered to upgrade and no I haven't tried the demos and no I don't give a shit.
I regulary check out the borland.public.delphi.non-technical to see what's going on in Delphiland. Half the comments are from
The other half of the comments are from the Delphi evangelists clinging on to the vain hope that Delphi will some day come back to its glory days and be the top IDE once more. All I can say to them is... can you feel the water around your ankles yet?
The only chance that Delphi has is pure and unconditional open source. I've suggested open sourcing Delphi several times but always my suggestions have fallen on deaf ears. I get short-sighted replies such as "and how can Borland earn their money"? and "oooh.. I hope not!". Too bad because it's been proven time and again that money can be made with Open Source and Borland is precisely at the right time at the right place to pull it off. Oh well, I guess they're going to miss the boat
END OF RANT
You get an IDE? I thought that was with the pro version (and that the pro version cost $$$).
I thought the was the countdown to the next update.
You are the man! Welcome to the club!
No, they're not bringing back Turbo Pascal. They're just rebranding Delphi and Delphi-based products as "Turbo".
Hearken, ye, to a Borland survior. (I wrote a good chunk of the API documentation in Delphi, C++Builder, and Kylix.) Borland somehow has always been run by people who know jack about managing other people. They can't implement the most basic corporate policies, like making people work on the stuff they were actually assigned to work on. So they fall back on Stupid Executive Tricks that they picked up at some seminar somewhere. When I was there, management was in love with "lifecycle management" tools, and actually acquired two vendors of them, neither of which actually had a usable product. But most often, the SET consists of simple-minded rebranding. Usually, it's just pointless, like bringing back "Turbo". But sometimes, they really screw up, like when they renamed the company "Inprise".
Hate to say it, but Borland's pretty much irrelevent. Their last serious achievement was Kylix, which took too long to get out the door, and which targeted a market (Linux desktop developers) that turned out to be nonexistant. And that was 5 years ago! Since then, most of their key people have moved on, and their tools group has stagnated. The fact that management thinks they can sell it just shows how clueless they are.
Delphi is still my favorite development environment. Or rather it would be, if I could bear to use it. Which I can't — it's just too depressing.
Any IDE is but a clone of the old Turbo line. full stop end of argument...
You never catch me alive
Does it still use pascal's weird funky operators chosen simply to be different from other languages?
Sorry, I don't have a clue what you're referring to. Delphi uses Pascal's perfectly commonplace operators chosen to be similar to myriad other Algol-derived or -inspired languages.
Just because you've never dared stray from braces languages doesn't mean that any other convention is "weird", "funky", or deliberately contrary, you know.
You mean like +, -, *, /? What about 'and', 'or', 'xor', 'div', or 'mod'? How are those "funky" compared to '==' '&&' '||' '^'? They seem pretty clear and descriptive to me. Perhaps you are referring to APL ;-)? Operator precidence is slightly different than C/C++, C# or Java... but not cripplingly so. In all fairness, Pascal does tend to be a little more verbose, but that is intentional in the design in order to encourage better self-documentation (yes, you should still comment your code!). Other differences include: The semi-colon, ';', is statement separator not a terminator, so there are a few places where it is optional and at least one place where it is illegal. The compiler is single-pass recursive descent. It is blazingly fast (on the order of >1M lines of code/minute on today's hardware). As a matter of fact, we find that the bottle-neck in the compiler is more on the I/O side than the actual compiling/codegen side. The produced code is very well optimized(yes, it *could* be better, but there are time/value tradeoffs being made).
.NET/IL compiler version.
As I write this, work is proceeding to add new language features such as generics (parameterized types), partial classes (class fragments), and some other items considered very "modern" by today's language standards. The Delphi language offers a significant level of source compatibility between the native Win32/ia32 compiler version and the
Fantastic bit of kit, I wish I still had a similar environment. i've looked for years but nothing's quite the same, including the clones. Man I could develop quickly with that stuff. Look, no mouse! Mmmm TurboRuby...
Deleted
I'm not sure how Borland will compete with Micro$oft for the student market. Students whose departments participate in the Microsoft Distribution Network Academic Alliance, get free versions of Visual Studio 2005 Professional, along with loads of other M$ software. Granted, it is for non-commercial use but they are full, un-crippled versions. I know, some would say that all M$ software is crippled, but you know what I mean.
My students are instructed to bring CD-R's the first week of class so they can get their free VS 2005 Pro. I used to use Borland's Turbo products, many years ago when I was first starting out in college. I don't remember how much I payed for them but I do remember them being student friendly.
How is Borland going to compete when college departments can pay $799 for the first year and $399 for each additional year of the MSDNAA and be able to give their students thousands of dollars worth of free software as well as install that software for free in their labs?
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
If I'm not mistaken, some of the more recent versions of their C++ compiler use the EDG C++ front end. It is very doubtful that they are able to release that code at all, let alone under an open source license.
The front end is often the most complex and also must necessary part of a C++ compiler. As shown by GCC and other compilers, a common back end can be used. So if they couldn't release the C++ front end of their compiler, open sourcing it would be of limited value.
FWIW, I was a college freshman and my first programming class was "Programming Concepts Using Pascal". Rather than use the university's mini-computer (horrible edit and compile environment), I wanted something I could use on a PC. Other Pascal compilers at that time were prohibitively priced for a student at hundreds/thousands of dollars. A friend pointed me to Turbo Pascal and I bought my own copy at Egghead for under $90. My very first software purchase by the way. I was a loyal fan following the product line from TP3->TP4->TC1->TC2->TP5->TC++1->BC++2->BC++4->BC5+ +.
With every iteration, they got a little more expensive even for loyal customers. Then they brought out the "Professional" versions and wanted more money - so I stopped.
How does this relate? TP3 let me do everything and anything I wanted (no-nonsense license) at an expensive (for me) but reasonable price. For the hobbyist or beginner, they will get frustated very quickly with the limitations imposed by the free editions but balk at paying $500 for a professional license. Offer them the professional level software with a no-nonsense license for $99 and Borland may see things turn around.
Apparently Borland is a company that doesn't really know what they want and are with a blurred strategy! At some point in time they decide to wash away the name they built and their long lasting achievements. And a couple of years later they are longing to the return of the very old days! They are in the business of building excellent (really excellent) development environments and gaining enormous acceptance and market share and then abandoning their products/names as if it has never bee theirs!!!
I've a copy of professional jbuilder 4 somewhere, some smart marketing executive thought i'd cough up $2000 usd for version five, i declined, along with version 6, they gave up postal marketing me after that.
Borland was always famous for its employee cockups
in a prior crisis they employeed too people called 'smith' the bright mbas in the hr dept sacked the smith that worked on products, but kept the mail room employee called smith on. Pink slip smith was invited to work at microsoft, he was not due to be fired but was.
It made the it press then it was humourous - it flagged them for me as a screwed up it firm back then.
Offtopic unless Borland cares about those markets. If Borland software can beat G++ even if not Intel's compiler, it has a market. Even if Borland software can compile C++ faster at low optimization levels, it has a market.
You mean like this?
If I change a C++ class's header file, watch all source code files that #include that header file get recompiled from scratch. But if the object files were changed incrementally as soon as I typed that semicolon to add one field or method, that would appear "turbo".Thank you - I didn't mean my original post as a troll.... I seriously didn't see the value of Pascal (a lá Delphi).
The Skype bit was an apt illustration of your point, however.
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."
I also have fond memories of programming in turbo products, turbo pascal for dos was my second point of entry into programming, the first was quickbasic, then turbo pascal, turbo c++ etc. Turbo products used to be amazing for there time, they really helped get the job done, and write fast efficient code. I really liked how you could embed assembly into your code directly to create super-efficient subroutines and such. Nowadays, your lucky if your compiler even compiles into machine code and not into some bytecode that gets interepretted by 2 virtual machines and a scripting engine before before any machine level code is generated. I miss the ability to perform low level optimizations on my code. Shameless Plug, my site, link in the footer, friendly link/no ad's or popups. The site also adopts somewhat of a turbo product color scheme, I think the influence was on a subconscious level though.
In 1985 I was using Microsoft pascal. 15 minutes to compile.
Along comes Turbo pascal, 20 seconds.
It was instant love.
Well, Borland's giving their own "Explorer" versions for free, too; I suspect some people will experiment with both free IDE's, and, when given a choice, chose to pay for the more advanced version of whichever suits them better.
There are some interesting features on the feature lists that may be competitive advantages compared to Microsoft's offerings.
At this point, I'd be ready for just about anything that let me get away from Visual Studio. I've used it since it was 16-bit, and I've even tolerated all the weird interface changes they've made to the IDE over the years. Through version 7.0, it was pretty much just a matter of re-learning where the things I needed were, which sucks, but whatever. It wasn't a big enough productivity sink to justify switching to something else. But with version 8.0 (a.k.a. Visual Studio 2005), Microsoft has officially lost their minds. They're so determined to push ".NET" and "managed" code down our throats that they've ruined what used to be a really solid development environment. Going into the details of why it sucks so bad would be too far off-topic, and lots of other web pages have already summed it up nicely. But sweet Jeebus, does it ever suck.
So bring on the Borland Turbo C++... There's never been a better timing opportunity.
Last time I checked they were about to sell their ide business.
Although I love object pascal, I have been forced to switch to other languages. They build great ide's but delphi 6 was the last really stable and perfoming version. My guess is that borland never recovered the loss of some key developers to Microsoft. (Anders Hejlsberg for example). The .net framework classes are just an improved version of the VCL. Every delphi developper immediately sees the similarities between system.windows.forms and Delphi's VCL.
And even worse: They discontinued kylix, so object pascal currently only runs on windows.
And Visual Studio.Net (along with 3rd party plugins like resharper) has pretty much anything you need for smaller projects (if it has to be windows), so there is no obvious reason to buy an ide from borland. (i count together as a modeling tool )
This is so sad, but true
How about Turbo Assembler? Actually they still have it on the price list, but it's been frozen at V5.0 for many years. It would be nice to see this one brought back to life, I still use it (V5.0) every day, but when the day comes that I get forced to port all my stuff to x86-64, TASM will have to go.
Others have pointed out that a big point of this is likely to attract buyers for their IDE group which is up for sale. As I recall, the "released" version of Mono is an open source, cross-platform .NET 1.1 (+some later features) implementation that Novell has invested heavily in; a set of commercial development tools that target .NET 1.1 might be particularly interesting to Novell.
As a matter of fact, it is my opinion that proprietary projects migrate to open source mostly to die a slow death. At best, any reasonably complex project that forgoes this transition is at high risk of being mutilated.
Yes, Interbase 6.5 did eventually spawn the Firebird project. But a db engine is quite different beast than a full blown development IDE with its own runtime and component library, so forgive me for being a skeptic in this case. Hell, just take a look at what JEDI project has become! And that's only the "component library" part of Delphi!
Feel free to mod me down, but I'm honestly tired of listening to these "Free Delphi!" campaigns. Free it from what?
So Borland made some terrible mistakes when trying to converge Win32 development with the new
Would you honestly want them to throw all this hard learned experience away and leave Delphi's future in the "capable" hands of the open source community?
Funcky? I'm not sure what you mean? Do you mean things like 'not', 'or', 'and', 'xor' etc, I'm not sure I would class them as funcky, they're pretty obvious to me.
What about Borland JBuilder? No Turbo version of that?
Microsoft started offering top people $1m/year salaries to snag them. While this seems like the market working, it's not quite real when Microsoft can use its massive cash reserves to cripple a company. Basically, if Microsoft can offer 20 key people $1m/year over market salaries, then the competition is either bled for $20m/year, which can destroy smaller competition, and hasn't cost Microsoft a dollar, or they spend $20m to put a competitor out of business by stealing key people and use their cash to establish a monopoly position.
This is blatantly anti-trust in the case of a monopolist, and was a lawsuit that I believe Microsoft settled.
Borland made some boneheaded management maneuvers, but this was after Microsoft crippled the company, and Borland made a desperate effort to recover.
Alex
Why don't they buy back dBASE and re-release dBASE III+? Yeah, that's the ticket!
The other part of it could be the Anders Heljsberg is an evil genius who just knew how to craft parsers and compilers better than anyone else. The evil part is that a claim has been made in these parts that the actual Delphi Object Pascal grammer doesn't have a spec the way the original Wirthian railroad tracks Pascal grammer did -- the Delphi grammer is supposedly proprietary and a trade secret, and that no one else can build a parser that handles all of the corner cases -- you might want a parser, not to build a competing Delphi but to build a smart editor, use Object Pascal has a kind of description language, etc.
But if you think Anders Heljsberg a genius, evil or otherwise, how come C++ Builder is dog slow on compiles in comparison. There has to be something to the Pascal language.
I am kinda switching over to Java Swing for the GUI, C++ through the JNI for the hardcore numeric stuff -- a person sees the handwriting on the wall about Borland longevity. I kinda want to get off Windows by the time Vista, Aero, and whatever Windows-specific GUI gobbeldygook takes hold, and Java looks attractive to me. It is easy to get spoiled by GC and some other Java hacks, but I miss the fast compiles -- javac is dog slow.
It seemed that Eclipse has a lightning-fast Java compiler in it -- someone told that it doesn't use javac but uses some hot-rodded IBM thingy. Eclipse, on the other hand, is still something I am struggling with -- it is IBMish in its weirdness about a whole bunch of stuff -- how do you just take a bunch of .java files in a directory and call it a project? It doesn't like a directory that is already there, and it wants to create some other directory in some standard location instead of where you want it. Still working on that one. So even Java needs "make files" of some kind of external metadata to organize multi-file source codes. Object Pascal famously has all of the dependencies specified in source code as a feature of the language.
If there are two features, no, make that three features! that make Delphi problematic for the future, they are 1) Delphi has some real solid Windows lock-in, especially since Kylix didn't go anywhere -- the Delphi extension to Pascal are quite Windows-specific even if you are not doing GUI programming, 2) while Delphi is great and everything, it is behind the times with collection classes and other library richness of everything from Java to Python -- what collection classes are there are also tied into the VCL and bloat non-GUI or GUI-non-VCL programs, and 3) well, Borland and the fact that everyone seems to be jumping off the Borland ship.
No Turbo Pascal for .Net?
so depressing
Well, as long as forever goes with Microsoft (The VS2003 toolchain didn't take long to disappear).
I wasn't aware that releasing a new version of a tool meant that the tool "disappeared".
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Codewright is dead. I'd like to say "bring back the Brief editor" which, as I recall, was owned by Borland. I'd like to, but now I'm using vslick. Your time, Borland, has come and gone. You tubed the products I used, so I had to find others. Now I like the replacements, so why change back? If we're talking TurboPython or TurboRuby, you might get my attention, but it had better be juicy enough to lure me away from the open-source alternatives.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
It was memory limited, wasn't standard Prolog and in general was a bad hack. Why would anyone be interested?
"...including a video of the Adventures of TurboMan."
Oh great. Yet another proprietary Windows/Mac/Linux only video. Remember last year when people actually used to curse Flash? Today it's the only format anyone will use. Why is no one concerned that Macromedia has a near total lock on online videos?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Back in the eighties it was Turbo this, Turbo that, everywhere you looked. Then in the nineties everything was Extreme, which got old pretty fast. Most recently a lot of things have been "On Steroids," which wore out even faster. It's kind of like the evolution of credit cards from Gold to Platinum to Titanium. I'm expecting a Plutonium card someday. Anyway, if we're going to resurrect Turbo then I think it's also time to bring back "o-matic."
Phillipe Khan back and some more copies of his CD of 'sax music' and we're really going places. Will they relaunch Sidekick too?
It will be interesting to see how this pans out though as on the face of it, this sounds like a seriously good move. Back in the day, many, many PC developers learnt their skills on Borland's cheap tools providing a ready market for the pricier 'pro' stuff. Obviously this time round they have MS's free dev tools to deal with so this will be an interesting battle for the hearts & minds of hobbyists and newbies.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Turbo Pascal was my first proper hobby programming language, the first programming language I bought myself. I had (have) a lot of love for Borland, and still remember the excitement of version 1 Delphi.
Borland produced great hobbyist languages, and some of us hobbyists pulled those Borland products into the enterprise. Borland messed up a couple of times, made a few bad products and basically lost their shine. If I had the same choices I had back in 1990 that I have now, I'd still be pushing the Borland route.
Unfortunately for them, hobbyists will now use one of the countless free & fun programming languages that are easy to use and install. Languages like Ruby or PHP. When they've cut thier teeth, they'll go get job in enterprises that insist on a proper programming language (microsoft, apparently). Borland have been cut out of the loop.
This is not a moan at open source, but I can't help but wonder if Microsoft's best programming language competitor is being killed by the Open Source movemement & if open source languages effectively allow Microsoft to maintain a monopoly in this area.
Training monkeys for world domination since 1439
I am glad that you find it a helpful tool, as I do. It is nice and clean to read, and handy to be able to compile the same, or very similar code, in both Win32 and .net :)
:)
Just FYI the guys behind the FCL also were the ones behind the Delphi VCL, so the two frameworks may have a very similar feel when you are using Delphi and C#
with just a little web searching it's fairly easy to create a make-based build tree that uses g++ and qt's qmake. the qt book is full of example trees.
use qt designer for RAD gui building (the gui is just am XML file) and finally cruft some help pages together and shove it into qt's assistant using a "-profile" DCF definition.
now upload the whole mess into a backed up CVS server and ba-da-bing, runs like stink.
this is the most productive set of development tools i've ever used, bar none, and it comes free on almost every linux platform...as long as you develop free software.
Pascal is a very well-designed language that features some really fast compilers. It may not be ideal for lower-level coding (the kind of thing you would use C for), but as a workhorse to solve numeric problems or for useful applications, it is really quite good. Some of the newer compilers also generate very efficient code. You can say what you want about Wirth languages, but the man knew something about them.
Anyway -- I never really understood why people were so down on Pascal. It's legible (if a bit verbose) and has nice support for modules and the like. Perhaps you have no motivation to move away from the language you are currently using, but people using Pascal (or Delphi) may have no motivation to move away from them either.
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
PROCEDURE Beep; BEGIN Sound(880); Delay(250); NoSound; END; [Sigh] Life used to be so simple. I don't know how DevCo makes much money but I am happy to see the word "hobbyist" used again. The ubiquity of the internet has driven the focus of the hacker community to web-this and web-that. Back in my day the focus was on elegant algorithms. Byte and Dr. Dobbs introduced me to disciplines I never would have seen through code. Fractal Geometry, Cartography, Langugage Processing, Queuing Theory, Ray Tracing, usw. Now, what? Google Maps mashups? Bah! Kids today...[shuffling off to Amiga, grumbling, drooling, smelling badly]
// //
I was blown away. I created my application in less than 3 days (minus user testing) --- but the best part is that my app was *fast*. Nearly as fast as if it was written in C/C++. My app was moderately complex (or at least not of the 'hello world' variety), performing user authentication via SOAP connection, connectivity to SQL database and record inserts, XML parsing, and multiple forms.
Hmmm... pretty cool as for the novice. If this is truth then respect!
500 bucks for a professional version?
.NET and C## oriented?
Comics as a promotional ad?
All right, high school and college kids under stolen XP, knock yourself out...
It can be worthwhile for performance reasons. They made a whole bunch of minor enhancements (like function inlining across units (D2005) and redoing all the assembler and memory manager (D2006). (and of course they merged some horrible Delphi.NET language abhorrations back into D2005/6 but you don't HAVE to use them).
If you do a lot of string processing, some more functions got standarised in strutils. Minor stuff, but hard to miss if you get used to it.
I was maintaining an realtime image recognition program, and it allowed me to squeeze one more camera using the same software per stock box that we deploy. (+/- 30% increase) However I still work with D7, I only compile releases with D2006. The new IDE is dog slow.
... of the IDE tools.
A few months ago in every occasion Borland was mentioning Delphi as a little cash cow, trying to attract the interest of possible buyers.
Later they announced the price range by means of a little theater, one of their investors offered to buy Delphi for $100 M, but Borland turned down the offer.
Finally they officially announced that the IDE tools are for sale because they can't focus on ALM tools while the IDE tools are round, LOL. IMO at least they should've thought of a little more convincing reason.
When after 6 months they realized that noboby is crazy enough to buy the IDE tools they began these hopeless tricks.
In other words Borland is saying: Delphi is a cash cow that we didn't sell even for $100M. However we want to sell it now, not that it's an old and overpriced piece of software that is bringing less and less money by every quarter, but simply because now we want to focus on ALM tools and we lose our concentration and if you don't believe us take a look at all this Turbo things and other activity.
Seems like there are a lot of people who followed .net to version 1.1 and stayed there. Is this perhaps like those corporations who stayed with NT for so long? It worked well enough? Or did 2.0 make mistakes?