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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."
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++.
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.
First thing to cross my mind when I read the headline was "holy crap, Borland's still around?"
My sig can beat up your sig.
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.
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make install -not war
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.
Yes, in my experience 2009 is rock solid. 2007 was already OK. I agree 2005 was crap.
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Algol was invented during that time frame. It had problems of its own, but it was the first step towards modern block-structured languages like Pascal and C. COBOL was a big step in the wrong direction. I mean, a compiler for "English"? Didn't it occur to Ensign Hopper that there's a reason mathematicians don't work in plain language?
I was on the Unix side, so my involvement with workstations was limited to being an end user. But I did have an nGen (which Burroughs OEMed as the B20 series) on my desk. I'll always be sorry that there was no place for the thing once lack of total IBM compatibility became a deal-breaker. There were so many things that were better thought out than other systems. Like those external, passively-cooled power supplies. And a keyboard where they actually thought through serious use cases, instead of just kludging onto the original teletype keyboard, as most keyboards still do.
I'm not sure which company surprised me more that it still existed! I was a MAJOR fan of Borland's products starting with Turbo Pascal 1... you have to remember that way back then compiling and linking even a 50-line Fortran program was a several minute operation, and suddenly it went down to several seconds.
I hung tough with Borland products for about 8 years, even buying Turbo Pascal 4 around 1988, just for the editor, even though I no longer used Pascal. I took advantage, along with several co-workers of a misprint in Egghead's flyer for the week to pick up Borland C++ 1.0, and later did some serious OWL program. To this day, I still think OWL was far better than MFC.
I even thought Object Pascal was a nice implementation, and would have enjoyed using it if the team had decided that way. They ended up going with Microsoft C++, which was good, even if MFC at the time was nothing better than a half-hearted first cut.
I spent many years using Visual C++ and generally loved it. To this day, VS6 is my favorite IDE. None of my clients and employers ever made the jump to .NET and by 2004 or so, I'd made the jump to working on Linux middleware... no so much because I didn't want to Windows any more, but because that's was the best job available.
As of today, I'm glad I'm not doing Windows C++ programming any more. The number of layers between the code and the metal has become so ridiculous you're hardly programming at all. It's all just cookbook code to use Microsoft's byzantine libraries, and then reverse-engineering them when they don't do what you expect or what the documentation says. Of course, one could argue it's always been like that, but 10 years ago, it was possible to rewrite and/or extend most of MFC into something really slick and way easier and faster to use. I know because I did it. Nowadays, I would dread having to wade into the enormous amount of stuff involved in Windows programming... whether it's good or bad, it's massive and complicated, and those are two things I can't abide.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.