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Borland Being Purchased By Micro Focus
An anonymous reader tips news that Micro Focus is in the process of buying Borland Software for $75 million. They also picked up Compuware's application testing and automated software quality business. Quoting ZDNet:
"The boards of both companies agreed to the deal, which is expected to complete around mid-2009. ... In 2008, Texas-based Borland made a pre-tax loss of $204m, almost four times the size of the previous year's loss. It had revenues of $172m, part of a consistent downward trend since at least 2004. ... Borland was one of the oldest software companies in the PC software business, having been founded in 1981. Its most successful era was in the late 1980s via massive sales of Sidekick, a DOS-based terminate-and-stay-resident personal productivity application, and development tool Turbo Pascal, which challenged Microsoft's dominance in the application-development market."
How many more companies are going to bust becuase of Microsoft before the US DOJ splits the company up?
"Micro Focus Net Express® is the market-leading COBOL development environment"
So, a company that should've died off in the nineties is being bought by a company that noone has ever heard of that should've died off in the eighties. Weird.
those were the days!
It's too bad the company went under like that, but I would have to blame the executives for making such massively bone-headed business decisions.
Anybody remember Inprise? After about a year of incredible downturn, they decided, "You know what? Maybe Borland wasn't a bad name after all"
Idiots
Delphi *was* my favorite language
Sidekick, a DOS-based terminate-and-stay-resident personal productivity application
Aaah good old terminate-and-stay-resident programs, from the heydays of non-multitasking OSs. Anyone else remember Int 27h and the magic of hooking a subroutine to make it appear like your OS was actually multitasking? Hmph...kids these days..
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
I remember, back in the day, when all malware was written in borland C/C++.
Er.. not that i wrote malware. >_>
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
Borland is still around? I assumed they'd died back in the mid-90s...
Great acquisition, Micro Focus. Are you going after Norton next?
#DeleteChrome
It's a shame that they are going under, because C++ Builder is he best C++ IDE for Rapid Application Development, by far.
You can design forms and controls in the same way as Visual Basic, but it is C++.
Man - between all that bullshit and bands like "A Flock of Haircuts" it was enough to make Max Headroom hurhurhur-HURL!
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Buying Ashton-Tate, maker of dBASE, was their downfall. Huge outlay and the migration to windows was a massive failure.
First Sun now Borland? Very sad but in both cases you had good technology and poor management. I realize that IBM's funded free Eclipse made hurt Borland JBuilder sales but to sell off the development tools division? Really?
You can design forms and controls in the same way as Visual Basic, but it is C++.
I thought that was called Visual C++.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I'm not sure what surprised me more when I read this: that Borland still exists, or that Micro Focus still exists.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Let us not forget that Borland had a pretty dominate position in the programming C/C++ IDE market way
back in the early 90s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_C%2B%2B
I remember all of the C programming college courses in my area all used Turbo C as the preferred IDE.
I remember that many folks claimed Microsoft sabotaged Borland's product by integrating their Visual Studio with windows in ways that Borland just could not do. This was years before the Netscape lawsuit! I even seem to recall reading that Microsoft was accused of preying on Borland's staff and hiring them away. Perhaps someone with more knowledge than I can provide some more information on those bygone days.
...included a BSD-licensed open source utility I worked on - PMD. I recall getting some nice emails and phone calls from them saying they were packaging it up, and they sent in some bugfixes and new rules and whatnot. They bought a couple of copies of my PMD book, too, which was nice.
Generally, I thought they were a good example of how a software company could bundle up and enhance open source software, contribute back, and still turn a profit. Selling that part of the business for $58M, sounds like it worked out OK for them...
The Army reading list
Micro Focus has some of the worst install scripts and asininely oppressive "License Managers" I have ever seen in my decade+ of enterprise software experience, and for the amount of money they want for their products, you'd think they'd have the decency to get this stuff right. Every time I have to work with Server Express I pray for the speedy end of COBOL for enterprise batch processing just so I don't have to go through the pain of installing/licensing the damn thing. The balls it must take to write an application that hobbles your server by only allowing a specific number of COBOL's (say 5) to run concurrently or the "License Manager" will throw a fit ...
Thinking of Borland still gives me fuzzy memories. Every IDE they have made I have liked using (i even liked Kylix in itself, except it was impossible to use on (or the applications for that matter) non supported distributions of Linux).
I know they effectively died because of their decision to focus on the middleware.
Their tools were great, but it was sad that their management couldn't plan the products for the newer market place.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/1997/0512borland.html
In the end, Microsoft strategy of simply throwing obscene salaries at the Borland talent ultimately worked. It was systematic, it was effective.
Now go suck on Visual Studio.
I believe they sold more Delphi licenses than turbo pascal. Furthermore I think Delphi was the the impetus at Microsoft for things like the MS developing a true IDE, J++/visual J and finally C# which btw was architected by the very same guy that did Delphi.
The biggest shame was when at the end Borland tried to sell their compiler business for roughly $1b no one wanted it, eventually some veritably unknown company called Embarcadero made an offer for $24m for the business and that was the end of that.
Lesson of the day: Regardless of how good/essential the products you deliver may have been, bad management and poor future insight can make you crash and burn.
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
I bought 3 different versions of their Turbo C++ products and Turbo Assembler in the 90's, and had a great time with them learning to program. But then came along C++ Builder, which ended the affair. I gave Kylix a try after I switched to Linux to see if I couldn't rekindle the flame but that was like pouring a bucket of water on smoldering embers.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
You thought wrong. VC++, 6 at least, did not have a comparable form designer to that in VB or Delphi. Only with .NET has Microsoft finally caught up with RAD form design.
May StarTeam die an ignominious death!
C++ Builder and Delphi were sold off some time ago (to Embarcadero in 2008, according to wikipedia), so I'm not sure what Borland actually does these days, but it should have no effect on any of the CodeGear stuff. I still use Delphi, it's a great IDE, but not as nice a language as c# imho, maybe there'll be a C# Builder in RAD studio at some point.
Oh no... it's the future.
Only with .NET has Microsoft finally caught up with RAD form design. .NET is over 7 years old now... You might as well be railing against Windows 98.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
COBOL may not have much mindshare among slashdotters, but there's a lot of COBOL code out there. Most of those boring apps that do nothing but apply simple business logic, like the one that cuts your paycheck, are written in COBOL. Remember the Y2K crisis? That was mostly about COBOL apps.
Which isn't a defense for the continued existence of COBOL. I only disagree with your statement that it should've died off in the 80s because I think it never should have been invented, with its stupid pseudo-English syntax. But like Fortran and RPG, it's too well established to be disposed of.
Assuming that Borland still does IDEs and compilers (weren't they trying to spin off that business?) this is a really good fit. Borland's tools are really kewl, but they've never gained serious mindshare, and survive only because of a lot of diehard users. Not, strictly speaking, legacy tools, but really the same kind of marketplace.
Incidentally, I used to work for Convergent Technologies, which back in the early 80s sold a MicroFocus COBOL compiler for its 68010 UNIX boxes. This compiler was, weirdly enough, written in COBOL. Somebody once explained to me why this made sense, but I've forgotten the explanation.
All the developer tools were shipped off to CodeGear a few years ago. They are now owned by Embarcadero who are starting to invest more heavily in R&D. Delphi and C++ Builder 2009 are a vast improvement on the previous offerings.
My favorite Borland product was Paradox for Windows, a RDBMS engine and GUI with IDE. The engine was available as a C++ library for embedding. It brought together programming and data techniques from spreadsheets, databases, languages and GUIs that made "Windows" a complete and consistent platform.
Borland, or somebody, could do exactly that with existing OSS code today. The software world could use such a tidy tool, and especially a competent company to market it. Maybe that's Oracle now, but the game is just getting rebooted again.
--
make install -not war
They had good development IDEs like Delphi, C++ Builder, Jbuilder. The problem they never integrated JBuilder with their app server and support sucked big time. JBoss, eclipse killed Borland products on the Java side. They could not compete with MS VB and Visual C++. They could not revamp themselves to competition from JBoss and eclipse like companies. Bad to see it go though, my first real paying job was to program in C++ using Borland 3.0 IDE.
I'm forced to use Star Team, and although it has some nice features there are a LOT of things wrong with it. It is a good example of an anti-productivity tool. Can't believe they bought it. I have a suspicion they don't use it for their own source control, or they would have fixed a lot fo these things a long time ago. Nice as Turbo C/Pascal were in the day, and although I never used it Delphi seemed reasonable, I agree 100% bonehead.
It was blinding fast for a compiler of its day, running on a 1 MHz Z-80. There was no debugger, but if a Turbo Pascal program halted with an error at a given location (which it would politely print out before quitting), you could run the compiler to find out which line of code that location represented. It was cheap, too -- fifty bucks or so at a time when other compiler makers were charging $300 or more.
I wrote a computer game in Turbo Pascal that got me my first job in the game industry. VERY fond memories.
I piss off bigots.
I loved getting a new version of borland C. You would receive a box with 23 3.5" floppy disks and have to sit there for a few hours while the installation software said, "Please insert disk #" Of course this was on my massive 15 inch monitor. I was totally amazed when I received a version with a CD-ROM. Not that my PC had a CD-ROM, but a little Novel Networks magic and you could remote mount a drive. Heady days indeed.
All the people remembering Borland's language wars with Microsoft, and came up on the other side, should know that all of those tools were sold to Embarcadero some time ago. The Borland that we knew has already been gone for quite some time. Turbo C++, C++ Builder, Turbo Pascal, JBuilder, etc, all live on at Embarcadero. In fact, I think Embarcadero even got the Borland database...
This is my sig.
And funny it didn't start to happen until Anders Hejlsberg was bought from Borland to recreate Delphi for the drooling masses and make it look like Microsoft created RAD programming.
So, a company that should've died off in the nineties is being bought by a company that noone has ever heard of that should've died off in the eighties. Weird.
Micro Focus is still around, because Microsoft saw no reason to acquire or crush them back in the eighties or nineties.
Weird.
No, not weird, but it shows that you can run a business in a niche, but profitable market by flying under the acquisition or crush radars of other giants. If they are not worried about you, they are not going to acquire or crush you.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Two very popular Borland products back in the day were the Quattro Pro spreadsheet and the Paradox relational database. Quattro Pro had WYSIWYG and three dimensional features running on DOS way before Lotus. Paradox was a huge advance over dBase III in ease of use and report writing.
If you had 2 MB of system RAM, they could both exist in system memory at the same time and swap back and forth. Not quite multitasking, but innovative at the time. Using DR DOS made the memory tricks easier. Ah... memories.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
First of all, before I go on a trip down memory land, WTH?
When have they left Scotts Valley? Bloody traitors.
Okay, now that I have gotten that out of my system, I remember when Turbo C kicked Microsoft's Quick C into oblivion. I mean, when Quick C could muster maybe 80K size out of a simplest program, Turbo C could squish it to maybe 12K. Don't laugh, in early days of DOS, that was important.
Also, anyone remember register pseudo-variables in Borland C? God, they ruled. Combined with the "List of Interrupts" they placed power and speed at your figertips that only rightly belonged to the creator.
Alas, they took IBM's commitment to OS/2 too seriously. I remember when they put so much resources into OS/2 tools development. I must have been a huge financial blow and a loss of invaluable development time when IBM just walked away, whistling. That might have been the beginning of the end for them. It may have been partly my fault. Back in those days I, too, carried the "I want my OS/2" button.
This is a sad day. Like so many icons of Silicon Valley of the early glory days, one more star has burned out.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
"Turbo Pascal, which challenged Microsoft's dominance in the application-development market"
I thought the original Turbo Pascal was a one-pass compiler that ran from memory as compared to Microsoft's Pascal two pass compiler and linker that ran from floppies. Turbo Pascal also ran as an IDE. Microsoft Windows didn't even exist at the time. So the logic of how Borland challenged Microsoft's dominance in the application-development market escapes me.
--
ms.time.paradox©
davecb5620@gmail.com
Wow, blast from the past...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Borland has some great console manipulation routines built-in.
Use it almost daily for running tests with a CLI.
Can't be beat for fast easy results.
Cause, that would be awesome.
What exactly is Micro Focus buying from Borland since they seem to have divested themselves of everything except something called StarTeam...I went to their website and I'm still not 100% what StarTeam is or does for me.
Maybe that's why they're in dire straits...they make software that takes multiple pages and graphics and bullet points and still doesn't seem to convey exactly how this will help me.
... was its amusingly heavy reliance on people consistently agreeing to buy suspiciously frequent "upgrades" to development software that already worked just fine. Borland tried to create a sort of subscriptions-based business model without actual subscriptions, and people balked. Borland never made quite as much money as it anticipated; it underestimated the fiscal and material conservatism of its target market.
C++ Builder and Delphi were sold off some time ago (to Embarcadero in 2008, according to wikipedia), so I'm not sure what Borland actually does these days, but it should have no effect on any of the CodeGear stuff. I still use Delphi, it's a great IDE, but not as nice a language as c# imho, maybe there'll be a C# Builder in RAD studio at some point.
There was a C# Builder in BDS 2006, but I'm not sure about RAD Studio now that they've ditched Delphi.NET and are doing the whole Prism thing now.
What, no Khan joke?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
You can design forms and controls in the same way as Visual Basic, but it is C++.
Wow! So it's exactly like Microsoft's Visual C++, except less-supported!
Seriously, how out-of-date is your knowledge that you didn't know about Visual C++? It's been around for ages-- hell it's probably the reason most companies dumped Borland Builder.
Comment of the year
Any company with a founder named that is doomed!!!!
http://khaaan.com/
Last I heard of Borland was when I purchased Borland's C++ DOS based IDE. That must have been back in the early to mid 90s. I'm surprised they are still around and at that, producing $172m in revenues!
PFfffffffffft. Visual C++ STILL makes you do shit the hard way. Want to change the color of the font of a text box? You have to manually catch OnCtlColor/WM_CTLCOLOR and call SetTextColor. Want to change the background color of a button? Have to catch OnEraseBkgrnd/WM_ERASEBKGND, create a brush, select it into the display context, then delete it.
Not hard, but extremely tedious. Especially when something like C++ Builder has these as properties for the widgets in the IDE.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
"they took IBM's commitment to OS/2 too seriously .. IBM just walked away, whistling"
I thought OS/2 was a joint project between IBM and Microsoft? Perhaps that explains Borlands decision to commitment to OS/2 too seriously. MS also leaned on IBM to drop OS/2 else it would be forced to pay higher prices for software. See also IBM chief: Microsoft killed OS/2
davecb5620@gmail.com
Apparently you didnt use MFC.
If you stuck to its weird ass ways it was awesome at rapid dev. You could then control each control like nobodys business. Move over to VB and it was backwards and you had to jump thru a few hoops to do it.
I usually found the people spouting what you are saying never BOTHERED to figure out how the system worked. Had one dev defend that it took 50 lines of code in C to make 1 dialog. Was a tad miffed when I did it in about 5 (including brackets and includes). Accused me of cheating. I looked at him and said
'I did not cheat I learned how the system worked not the tool'.
'But you would need a bunch of code to handle that button'.
'And you wouldnt need that code in VB?'
All of them have their place. Just as .net has its place now. But none of them are the end all be all of development. I can count on one hand the number of times I shipped an application that used something from a rapid dev. But I would need everyone's digits in this building for the number of times I threw rapid dev code away. That says a lot. Usually the rapid dev code just gets you started. But you can get the same effect from a set of good templates. .Net does the same thing really. It just 'hides' it in the twist ups. It just has huge templates to map out the 'easy repetitive code'. You can build whole applications with the rapid dev stuff (I have). But it has its place. One is not necessarily 'better' than the other. It usually is just matter of what frame work the GUI is plugged into.
Al and his mother will be pleased.
I remember turbo pascal / borland pascal. I never liked Pascal, and it took 25 years to figure out why.
Do you remember "Second Life"? I guess it still is operating. For awhile they had weekly/daily slashvertisements but they seem to have gone away. Anyway, SL would not allow arbitrary usernames, you had to select one of their predefined last names. Pascal was available. Unfortunately someone already selected first name "GNU" and "Turbo" was long gone... I thought it would be funny to be called "Borland Pascal"
Now if there was one thing SL was famous for (other than the furries, their own little housing bubble, and their gambling establishments) it was creepy men "wearing" teen girl avatars trying to pick up other men.
Every time I logged in to SL, it was creepy how these "teen girl" avatars all came up to me to mention, "hey, did you know there used to be a computer language with your name? I used to use that in college"... etc etc.
So, yes indeed, in SL, alot of the women are not only men, but are old male Pascal programmers. So, after a quarter century, I finally figured out why I didn't like Pascal.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I am curious if anyone understands the relationship between former Borland and current Embarcadero. It seems Embarcadero owns most of the apps and tools that Borland used to make, and they also live in Borland's former building in Scott's Valley. Curiouser and curiouser... Could it be possibly that Embarcadero is former Borland who simply shed its name to some Texas-based company? Anyone with better insight care to chime in?
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I worked in Borland, when it was indeed Borland. Great company, you could not find another place with so many fine minds.
What is called Borland today is not the company that people knew. The management stole the name, connected it with mindless, buzzword-rich nonsense and moved the headquesters from Scotts Valley to Texas. They were selling nothing and that's what MicroFocus is buying: nothing.
The core of Borland's business, compilers and IDEs was spun off as CodeGear, recently purchased by Embarcadero Software. CodeGear is still located in Scotts Valley with many of the original developers in the group. Great people with a passion for tool development.
It's not a coincidence that Borland, the travesty, has been losing money at incredible speed after CodeGear was gone. The only part of the business that made sense, that generated revenues, was let go by a management simply unable to understand what a compiler is.
That the name Borland, which was synonym of innovation and "barbarian" spirit, is now associated with the leading name in a technology that was an embarrassment in the 80s, COBOL, is a shame that makes me cringe to no end.
Remember, this is not Borland, the real Borland, the one that brought us such gems as Turbo Pascal, C++ builder, Paradox, JBuilder etc, and that in general taught Microsoft how to write IDEs, is called CodeGear.
The company mentioned in this article, is a travesty and a sham.
Turbo Cobol :-)
Ah, the great teaching tool that it was. A fairly strict and clean language with few possibilities to shoot yourself in the foot, a simple-to-use 2D graphics library, and excellent IDE for that time, complete with integrated debugger - and all that made it an ideal platform for teaching programming. It's still used in many Russian schools today for just that purpose. There are even unofficial (but complete and fairly good) translations of Turbo Pascal help files to Russian, to help in this.
Wow! So it's exactly like Microsoft's Visual C++, except less-supported!
Seriously, how out-of-date is your knowledge that you didn't know about Visual C++? It's been around for ages-- hell it's probably the reason most companies dumped Borland Builder.
Spoken like Visual C++ _wasn't_ an oxymoron for the longest time.
The Borland Museum has the old Turbo series of Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, and Turbo C++ for MS-DOS downloadable for free.
Turbo Pascal and Delphi got replaced by Free Pascal, and Turbo C++ got replaced with GNU C++ and MinGW C++ for Windows which are open source alternatives to them. Which I think is why the Borland Museum got opened and why the command line version of Borland C++ was given away for free.
While people were waiting for the Borland Museum to release Delphi 1.0 the Lazarus Project was developed based on Free Pascal to replace Delphi.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Buying Ashton-Tate, maker of dBASE, was their downfall. Huge outlay and the migration to windows was a massive failure.
That wasn't their downfall. Their downfall was the same thing that made WordPerfect an also-ran, that virtually destroyed Novell, that ended Netscape, and heavily contributed to the end of Sun: Microsoft.
Love them or hate them (and at Slashdot it's usually the latter), Microsoft is single-handedly responsible for the deaths of many tech companies. In Borland's case, they simply couldn't survive against MS Visual Studio. Everything else they did or did not do pales against that fact.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
But it hasn't been for almost a decade so... welcome to the modern era!
Comment of the year
Almost ten years ago, in my early twenties, I asked in a forum which language to learn for relatively simple, Windows applications. I am not a professional programmer, just a hobbyist.
Most people replied that the best language for RAD was Delphi. A few said go with Java. I didn't choose any of these, I preferred Visual Basic to have the peace-of-mind of Microsoft.
Delphi died when the .NET and C# arrived, Java will probably lose its mojo now that Oracle leads the development. I don't know, we may hate Microsoft but most of the times is the last player standing.
Choose Borland-like companies only if you have a backup plan.
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
No, at the time the C++ Builder design-time environment in the IDE was far superior to the VC++ one. It actually approached VB in terms of functionality and ease of use.
A forms designer was ever high in the list of priorities for the VC++ team. At one point in the WinDNA/COM craze of the late 90s and early 00s (especially after ATL was first released and COM support was added to the compiler) some of the Microsoft TAMs were even recommending clients build GUIs in VB and actual application logic with VC++ [1].
[1] I'll refrain from repeating what I said to one of them when they tried to sell me that bit of nonsense. Let's just say it involved threats of physical violence and their mom, in that order.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
which challenged Microsoft's dominance in the application-development market
and then Microsoft bought Anders (Hallowed be His name)...
Borland suffered a lot at the hands of Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior, both directly and indirectly since that behavior was in large part responsible for IBM dropping OS/2. It might be worth acquiring them just to try to squeeze an antitrust lawsuit out of the deal.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
running Turbo Pascal for CP/M(!) on a Coleco Adam (!!). Ever see a 32 column screen virtually display 80 characters? Not fun.
I've been waiting for TurboCOBOL forever!
This sig is the express property of someone.
With a loss of $204m on $172m of revenue, my guess would be that they don't do much of anything nowadays.
It's rather sad really, as I, like many others here, have fond memories of Borland's old IDEs. I still use Delphi 7 for Windows GUI projects, though maybe it's time to have a look at what CodeGear's (or is it Embarcadero?) been up to. I also use VisualStudio'08 for WM apps, and while it's also quite nice, Delphi just seems to be so much... better.
They killed of Brief ... now it is their turn to rot. not that i hold a grudge or anything ...
I can't wait for Borland Microfocus Turbo COBOL!
http://rocknerd.co.uk
OFFICIAL WINNING NOTIFICATION. We are pleased to inform you of the released results of the Sweepstakes Promotion organized by Microword Corporations, in conjunction with the foundation for the promotion of software products, held this April, 2009 here in Madrid, Spain.
Ohhh... Micro Focus.... Never Mind..
Which is a shame really. My first commercial software writing experience was in ObjectPAL in Paradox for Windows for IBM on a Federal Project.
It was easy to build small relational databases with great GUI front ends and it blew my customers away.
Moved on from that to C, C++ and PowerBuilder in the banks before moving to Java then the normal LAMP set up. I've also used VisualStudio.
Maybe it's just my age, but nothing seems to touch Delphi, Powerbuilder or Paradox for Windows for ease of use in terms of building a rich client interface - something like it for Web 2.0 world would kick some serious...
-- For evil to triumph it is enough that good men do nothing.
I remember using Micro Focus cobol to write DOS apps in the early 90's. That language seemed antiquated in those days, but it's still king for certain types of systems.
It's good to remember that StarTeam is a Java product, not a Delphi product.
We've just switched to StarTeam where I work. Is there anything bad I should be watching out for?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
The GP specifically spoke of form designers. Your whole rant is utterly meaningless, as you aren't talking about the same aspect at all.
I saw a demo of OV and thought it was going to big boost in productivity for getting an app up and running. Problem was, the programming language was based on spreadsheet commands, and there were no arrays(!). I worked in a 4GL back in those days called DataFlex (still around, btw) and it didn't have support for arrays, either.
Why would you design a programming language without array support?
If you post it, they will read.
I have fond memories of writing code in the 1980s using Turbo Pascal 3.0. The entire compiler and editor fit in 48K and the run-time library was only 12K. Granted it was stuck creating .com files with a 64K limit but it's amazing what could be done at the time with so little memory. Hell, just sed on my Linux box is 56K, and that doesn't include the libc shared run-time library. I remember an add-on patch that also added an integrated debugger as well.
I then moved on to Turbo C and later releases of Turbo Pascal which were still speed demons compared to the alternatives out there, and TASM ran circles around MASM with far fewer bugs.
I continued to use Borland C++ for several years while I worked as a summer intern in the early 1990s for writing DOS TSR applications for a laptop manufacturer. I had switched a number of their assembly projects from MASM to TASM as well since it was a lot better. TASM would catch a lot more errors and would report much more meaningful information than MASM, plus TASM was also a lot faster.
I remember when they came out with the Windows versions how Borland ran into trouble with Microsoft because when Borland wanted to support MFC Microsoft said they had to drop their OWL library, which was in many ways superior to MFC in order to license MFC.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Other than frequent crashes, s l o w r e f r e s h e s, a Java client made by saboteurs, a couple hundred millions interface inconsistences(in most screens, pressing enter or escape do nothing), a braindead labeling schema, tectonic-speed checkouts, rude and intrusive dialogs that steal focus from whatever the fuck you're doing, the fucking JVM that eats oodles of RAM, the goddamn interface that suddenly frozes for a minute or ten, the motherfucking MPX, the metric fucktons of annoying as hell bugs that send your goddamn motherfucking productivity down the tubes, the incredibly shitty compare and merge tool and a couple other things that spring readily to mind no, there's nothing bad
Yes, I'm a CM and use Starteam daily for my sins. Why do you ask?
This way I could make my environment unusable to Windows, vi, and Emacs users all in one fell swoop.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Of course, it was Intel that paved the way for Microsoft dominance. Intel had strong compiler technology and a nice macro assembler well before anyone. However, they chose to restrict their tools to their proprietary development systems rather than port them to PCs.
Why? Because they sold a dev box for $25K, and made an huge profit on each one, and they'd only make a few dollars per software sale. It didn't occur to them that someone else's software (e.g., Microsoft, Borland) would cannibalize their dev box sales.
I concur. I use it on Windows so it might be different elsewhere, but...
Network timeouts after disuse get annoying "Lost connection" messages - there's no way to recover. It's faster to CTRL_ALT_DEL and open task manager and kill javaw.exe than to attempt to close it using the X and battle the "i can't close the application because the server isn't responding" logic.
"Update Status" gets stuck sometimes and you can't even "compare files" to see if you are up to date. "File is locked"... have to kill ST and restart, which gets slower with every version. The "file compare" function gets stuck on "Finding differences" and the only solution is a) find the temp file that is causing problems and delete it b) when that doesn't work, because it won't, reinstall ST completely.
When you check in a file, and "compare differences" to make sure everything is entered in the check-in message, you can either type in the commit box, or scroll through the differences in the compare tool - but not both. You could in the old version, so they intentionally cocked this up looks like.
Enter a commit message and forget to lock the file first (for those 5-second changes) or if there is some conflict on the local drive and it errors, it throws away the entire message and you have to re-type if you want it back. That's when I learned the art of selecting all and copy before hitting enter. And sometimes that doesn't work, so select all, cut, paste, and then you're sure it's on the clipboard so hit OK.
I use the keyboard as much as possible, but it's shite for keyboarding as mentioned.
"View Manager" is a travesty. I have had so many conflicts and such I couldn't make sense of, and it took 4 hours to sync a vew!!!! I resorted to copying the files manually from one view to another and then manually re-check them in to bring the base view up to date. I finally gave up and used labels/tags instead.
You open it, and it takes several minutes to get to a usable state, so let it run in the background. Well it calls SetForegroundwindow() every time it accomplishes something, so just start it and read slashdot and ALT+TAB back to slashdot a few times. when you no longer notice that it's annoying you, it's been ready for a while and you just lost half your workday. It's not a tool for the impatient.
I did ask the server admin where one of my files went and they couldn't find it (it's in the view, but can't do anything with it), but that was maybe 2005 version and we have updated.
It's easy to have duplicate files with the same name, especially when merging views. So one is "unknown" and the other up to date, then you update the other file and they switch. One is locked, the other isn't... Depending on the situation and how it happened you can actually lose commit comments and history when this happens, just choose the most useful one and remove the other one.
The view settings by default go to the first one in the list, so I have someone else's filtering on every folder and have to change it. I can add my own view type, and if it's alphabetically before everyone else's, the ENTIRE USER BASE for that server gets my new view as default. Name it something dirty with a leading underscore or less-than and hilarity ensues. Maybe they fixed that in 2008, but that's seriously broken. It's actually very easy for a simple user to make changes that affect all other users, like re-locating the local repository location for individual files or whole folders.
You can program it using COM objects, and it's fairly easy to find samples on like codegear, if that still exists, but documentation is crap. I wrote a VB6 app that would check stuff in and out and lock it and do simple stuff, just so I didn't have to load this virus into memory. I used it to select files for review documentation, since it's very difficult to get information out.
I asked for a simple "Copy folder location" or "Open containing folder" function - you have to right-click, properties, and then it's hard to sele
It's also good to remember that StarTeam is a Borland product, not a Sun product.
And here you can find a GPLed port of TurboVision, the Text-user interface library that powered later Borland products and that used to be bundled with the compilers (and later released into public domain).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I think Borland underestimated two things: {...} and the way businesses used development platforms - to talk to databases.
Perhaps you should google around about Why Delphi was called Delphi.
Delphi was envisioned from the beginning as a platform to communicate with databases.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Seriously, how out-of-date is your knowledge that you didn't know about Visual C++? It's been around for ages-- hell it's probably the reason most companies dumped Borland Builder.
Spoken like Visual C++ _wasn't_ an oxymoron for the longest time.
But it hasn't been for almost a decade so... welcome to the modern era!
Really? Show us the native GUI designer in VC++ 2005 or 2008 (a link to the MS docs will do as proof), then describe how that's as good (or better) overall than the GUI designer in C++Builder 2007 or 2009. VB.Net and C# have first class PME-based GUI designers in Visual Studio, but that has never been a priority for VC++. Visual Studio itself has had features since VS98/6.0 which CodeGear's IDEs should have matched back when they still carried the "Borland" name, but that's another matter entirely. Another post describes just two annoyances of GUI work in MFC, and this sort of tedium is the rule when you need to do anything even remotely outside MFC's idea of "normal". While the VC++ compiler has been improved tremendously, the "Visual" in Visual C++ remains a sad joke over a decade after VC++6 was released. IMHO, this is the single glaring deficiency remaining in Visual Studio, and it's only this way because those in charge in MS's tools division don't consider C++ a "first class" language.
- T
I forgot that the clock speed was faster than 1 MHz. Must have been thinking of my old KIM-1.
I piss off bigots.
Sorry, but completely off topic:
You spelled 'cool' as 'kewl'. By chance did you happen to play Everquest 1 on the Luclin Server? :)
That spelling, 'kewl' brought back memories, as I and another friend started using it on the server often, to see if it would spread and replace 'cool'.
It did! kewl just feels easier to type than cool, and as Everquest 1 was basically EverChat, the faster you typed, the more you got done.
The spread of kewl across Luclin seemed to coincide with a much more massive adoption of all the older internet abbreviations (lol, lmao, etc..) into the mmorpg world.
Perhaps the better products will survive?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Personally i had a roots supercharger.
And my PC had a 'slow down' button, when pushed it slowed, when released it went faster. Sort of anti-turbo :)
---- Booth was a patriot ----
... was as close to TurboPascal as DOS to CP/M.
So similar TP programs would compile fairly easily in QP. Of course, that didn't improve my image of M$ back then.
Borland was the materialization of Wirth's ideas of how compilation could be made efficient. It was so good it even made the "compiler x interpreter" debate moot for some time.
Had Oberon become as developed as Pascal and maybe we'd have Linux based on something better than C.
Well, I guess now it's up to FreePascal and Lazarus.
Kaaaaaaaaaaaahn!
I remember coding away at my keyboard with Borland C++ 3.1, TASM & Turbo Pascal 7.0 back when i was a kid. Looking back it was some of the best programming experiences i've had in my life, even though the code quality was probably crappy.
Anyone else yearning for the days when programming was low level and just getting a stupid plasma effect to work smoothly gave you that warm fuzzy feeling in your stomach?
Even though we have it really good now (thank god for OS X, decent IDEs & Libraries) a lot of fun factor seems to have dissapeared. It doesn't matter what you write somebody else has already done a lot of the hard stuff for you (most of the time anyway) in the libs you use.
"all in native code w/o .NET" - by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 06, @01:47PM (#27848517)
Thank you for that information, especially the 'native code' portion I quoted.
Delphi's one of my favorite tools because of RAD development, & has been since 1997 when I saw it "knock the chocolate" out of both MSVC++ &/or VB, even DOUBLING MSVC++ in both strings & math handling (which every program does really) in (of all places) VISUAL BASIC PROGRAMMER'S JOURNAL Sept./Oct. 1997 "INSIDE THE VB5 COMPILER" issue...
It offers flexibility of app types you can build, & sheer speed of that non-interpreted executable code (that you could even fairly easily move to Linux via Kylix (Delphi on Linux)).
Good to hear this, as I'd rather build non-interpreter engine run code many times for speed of execution (though, like with .NET, there are times it is useful to use runtimes as well & yes, you can do that w/ Delphi in older models, but, why?)...
Anyhow - I'd like to give it a try @ some point (Delphi 7 user here) just to see how it's improved.
APK
"It's easy to have duplicate files with the same name"
We've experience something similar to this and we only have one view. Our biggest problem so far is that we have a file that shows up as being under source control if you log in as the ST Admin, but not under source control if you log in as anyone else.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
No, at the time the C++ Builder design-time environment in the IDE was far superior to the VC++ one. It actually approached VB in terms of functionality and ease of use.
C++Builder was closer to Delphi, anyway - which isn't surprising, since what they did was slap language extensions on top of C++ analogous to all Delphi Object Pascal dialect constructs, and then use that. It was good, but it definitely wasn't standard C++.
#3 Stop reopening bugs. [...]
#7 There is no bug. Stop reopening.
#10 Stop reopening the bug. If you want explanations pay somebody.
#17 Paid $1 via paypal. Trans ID 3H4989806A1962407 Please fix.
#20 [...]Ulrich Drepper is an arse[...]
#23 Stop reopening.
#26 Stop reopening the bug. And this is also no discussion forum. Go somewhere else.
#28 Stop commenting.
#35 from Osama bin Drepper
Is this open source terrorism? "Pay us money or the bug stays!"
#36 Idiot. There is no bug. Don't reopen.
#37 Will you reopen it for.. one MEEEEEEEEELLION dollars?
#38 There is nothing to reopen. Period.
#39 Would you say that's your FINAL ANSWER?
#40 Fine. Whatever. I'll revert it, assholes.
#41 I love DrPepper!
#45 please refrain from adding garbage on top of garbage. regardless of the original garbage, adding more will gain nothing.
#46 Fix your fucking shit. Do I need to come to your office and slap some sense into you?
Never seen such amazing stuff outside of /.
You can design forms and controls in the same way as Visual Basic, but it is C++.
Wow! So it's exactly like Microsoft's Visual C++, except less-supported!
Seriously, how out-of-date is your knowledge that you didn't know about Visual C++? It's been around for ages-- hell it's probably the reason most companies dumped Borland Builder.
Until Visual Studio.Net, the Borland C++ Builder was light years ahead of VS. I had to use both VS6 and BC++4 during 2000-2004, and VS6 was a pain compared to BC++4.
Then MS noticed BC++ gaining traction and copied all it's features into VS.Net.
The one problem BC++ always had, is that if MS came with a new OS, it would take them a couple of months to a year to catch up.
But it's really .Net and C# that made BC++ fall by the roadside.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
Check out Qt Creator http://www.qtsoftware.com/products/appdev/developer-tools/developer-tools. Version 1 was only released a couple of months ago and it is already very impressive!
No need to wait.
Delphi Prism
All the developer tools were spun off a couple of years ago into CodeGear, which was bought by Embarcadero last year.
All those tools you knew are still alive and well. Delphi 2009 is the best native Win32 developer tool in the world and the language is experiencing a renaissance with the addition of new language features such as generics and anonymous methods. The whole environment has recieved major upgrades as well, which has also benefitted C++ builder, since they use the same IDE. They are also really starting to nail down the documentation side, which honestly has been the suits weak point for years.
By the way, there are free trial versions! Check them out!
So the CEO and Executive Board that managed to cripple their Development Tools group (Delphi, CBuilder, JBuilder, etc.) by letting it publicly twist in the wind as trade bait finally bites the dust. They trashed their company's legacy to bet their ALM offerings could directly compete with the Rationals of the world. Goodbye and good riddance. It's hard to imagine a greater example of tech hubris than Borland's board. By casting doubt on Delphi's future, they managed to slash the market share of a tool used by over a million developers to the point that only a fraction of the remaining control library vendors and other ecosystem remain. Even many of the strongest, best known Delphi experts have had to largely move to .Net to keep working.
Amazing that just a few clueless men could very nearly destroy one of the strongest development tool engineering groups ever assembled.
A compiler of English (that is an interpreter of natural language) is the holly grail of computer programming.
Pretty much any sane person agrees that if you are programming it would be beter to write:
Add 5 to the variable a, please.
or
Add 5 to a.
Rather than
a+=5 or a=a+5
which are both ugly and cryptic (a=a+5 is not even consistent with regular algebraic conventions).
I programmed in both ALGOL and COBOL in the early 90s, the programs were acting in big volumes of data, while the COBOL programs were easily understood by novice programmers, you needed people with Engineering level education to understand ALGOL.
There is a reason mathematicians don't work in plain language, which has nothing to do with how we program computers.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You have not been even remotely close to a big datacentre, have you?
If I cold get a penny for every penguin's OS installation that has replaced a Sun machine, I could pay myself a holiday to the Antartic to watch the eponymous live birds.
In the other hand I have seen projects dropped and moved to Sun's ware because MS was found unsuitable for the task.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
While so many folks are talking about Borland's passing as a company, few are noting that it's much respected tools like JBuilder, Delphi, C++Builder, RAD Studio, and the InterBase database were put into Borland's CodeGear subsidiary and acquired by Embarcadero last year. So while the Borland name may soon be gone, Borland's legendary IDEs are better than ever with Embarcadero (www.embarcadero.com) and have several major new releases coming out this year.