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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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Tell me when they bring back TurboProlog...
That is all.
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.
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
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.
Me too. It would be really nice if they just ported that to Linux. It was the perfect IDE for me. Easy to use. Small and fast, with a shell to test programs.
But some improvements could still possibly qualify for the "turbo" moniker:
Yes, but didn't it require a 386 or better to run the IDE, or was that a different version? Always struck me as odd that it had a 32 bit processor requirement but no 32 bit compiler.
It was nice that you could write a simple single file C application, and compile and run it without any concern over projects and solutions or makefiles. Also nice that it gave a lot of screen real estate to the editor.
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.
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!!!