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Delphi for Linux
Thanks to several readers who wrote to us with the news that Inprise apparently will be porting its Delphi development tool, and others to Linux. This comes on the heels of the recent survey of the Linux developer community.
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Exactly. There are a lot of Motif programmers out there. Motif has been around for what, better than ten years now? And the free Lesstif has most of it covered.
True, Motif tends toward some ugly defaults (mostly in component spacing and apparent widget "thickness"), but these are easily overridden. There are even class libraries around to encapsulate Motif for the C++ hackers that really can't figure out how (or don't want to spend the time) to roll their own.
Not to say that {Mo,Less}tif is perfect, but it's silly to ignore the talent pool that exists for it.
-- Alastair
> Besides, if they chose Motif they'd have to licence it, adding it to the price of Delphi.
Or use Lesstif instead. (Modulo licensing issues with that, since I believe Lesstif is GPL'd.)(Er, I just checked, and Lesstif is LGPL'd. No problem.) Which would be great if it helps improve Lesstif.
-- Alastair
(IMHO)Well, it is. I've used the C/c++ tools from Borland and had great success, going from all the way back to their original Turbo C compiler up through the C++ Builder, which is Borland's C++ version of Delphi. Remember, these tools have been going toe to toe with M$'s Visual toolsets for years, with a high percentage of developers preferring the Borland/Inprise tools.
Within the realm of the C++ and the Delphi products, the real question is more which set of GUI components will be supported, i.e., Gnome, KDE, X, or perhaps a new set of components from Borland(?).
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Someone said "now I don't have to code the GUI by hand." I just wanted to point out that there are already free tools available that help in that regard. There is QtEZ, a very basic GUI builder for Qt development, and KDevelop, a GUI buider and IDE for KDE.
--
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> X is *NOT* a GUI!!!
> read: man X
DESCRIPTION
X Window System servers run on computers with bitmap displays
...
X supports overlapping hierarchical subwindows and text and graphics operations, on both monochrome and color displays.
And so on. For not being a GUI it sure seems to have a lot of blits, rectangles, lines, cursors, fonts, and colors wired right in. Oh yeah there's this X protocol thing which is useful for other things but is rarely used for it.
Can you dispense with the frothing at the mouth now?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
> 50.9% of people use Delphi.
The pool didn't show that. It showed that 50.9% of the people who answered the pool use Delphi (or are liars).
What Borland (Inprise) can use the pool for, is
1) Get a vague idea of the interest from the absolute numbers.
2) Get an idea of what those people who are interested in both Borland and Linux would like to see most. These will be their "easiest" customers, so that is quite significant.
Porting Delphi first seems like the brigtest move for Borland. They have a lot of existing customers using that, and unlike Java and C++ they are the only provider.