Desktops are starting to be much less critical than they once were, especially at home. The move is to portable devices--fancy PDAs, web-browsing cell phones. Desktop PCs are still important and useful, but stop and think and realize that 90% of desktop use is for a handful of applications: word processing, spreadsheets, email, web browsing, photo and video editing, etc. Quite frankly there isn't much need for more applications in these areas at the moment. Someone buys a PC, they get Word or Photoshop, and they're done with software. Games are a lot more disposable, but consoles rule the day there. The embedded computer market is growing like crazy, of course.
Because gaming software seems to be at as healthy a level as it has ever been.
Actually, gaming has been hurting for a few years now. Most of the little developers let themselves be bought out rather than go under. And unfortunately it's only a minority of big hit games that make money. People love to say "Look at Grand Theft Auto 3 and Splinter Cell!" but those are the exceptions.
Then why are you on Slashdot? Pretty much the same stuff. At least the kids can get together and do it in person.
The point is that you don't need a club for that. If you're going to go through the trouble of having one, for goodness sake don't just create a live version of Slashdot forums. You can already get enough of that on the web.
At one time a general computer club kinda made sense. This was before the web and before there were good magazines or books on particular topics (for example, programming graphics on the Apple II circa 1980).
Now, you need a point. Is the point to learn to write computer games? Is the point to learn different programming languages? Is the point to learn about security? Is the point to learn about system administration? Just getting together to yap about AMD vs. Intel and Linux distros and all that is pretty worthless. Computers are tools. Focus on how those tools will help you in a particular task or endeavor, not the tools themselves.
Most people miss the big picture for.net because of Microsoft's early hype about web services. Here's the overall plan:
1. Move as much Windows programming to the.net framework as possible, stop updating the Win32 API and mark it deprecated (doesn't mean you can't use it, but the official word will be to avoid it for new development). Eventually start changing the underlying system to be something other than Win32, essentially making Windows be a.net environment. This is how Microsoft is going to deal with eventually getting rid of the crusty old Win32 API.
2. Now that everyone is writing for.net, the processor is irrelevant. You can write applications for.net and get them running on Pocket PCs and other devices with minimal effort. Remember, Microsoft supports SH4, MIPS, PowerPC, and ARM processors for Windows CE.
In short, avoiding.net is simply going to cause you pain. The sooner you get comfortable with it the better.
... at least for now..NET is a "good" idea in theory. But it's performance is just not up to par compared to the execution times of applications using.NET vs C++.
Of course now there are commercial games being written in Blitz Basic and Python+SDL+Pygame, plus a huge number of games in recent years, even on consoles, include interpreted scripting languages. With 2GHz behind you and a graphics card that does all of the heavy visual lifting, people sticking to C++ for everything are just causing themselves extra pain. That's not to say.net is The Way, but it is at least one possible way.
Right, but they're a relative few. If you search, you'll probably only see a dozen at most. That's different than someone who jumps into any and all discussions.
This is a problem with all web discussions, too. There are people with vast, relevant experience--or at least people with reasoned views--and then you have idealistic college students (or these days, junior high school students) arguing with them. Of course no one ever listens to anything, so the arguments are completely pointless, but the ironic part is that once the younger posters grow up a bit, they often discover that, yes, they were wrong.
More and more I'm realizing that all discussion forums, except privately run invitation-only mailing lists, are an utter waste of time. They're great when you're a newbie in a field and don't know a whole lot, but after a while it becomes obvious that the people with the real knowledge stay away. You don't see Kay, Knuth, Kernigan, Carmack, or even Torvalds obsessively reading and posting on Slashdot forums.
(Yes, I'm fully aware of the irony of posting this to Slashdot.)
I guess we've all gotten used to artificially inflated monster technical books, where it's expected that Learn Java 2 in 24 Hours needs to be 950 pages or it's crap.
Here's a clue: Those big books are hugely padded by:
1. Large margins so there can be a little note every few pages. 2. Repeated program listings, also with huge margins. 3. A hundred or more pages of fluffy introductory chapters ("What is a programming language?"). 4. Massive redundancy.
Personally I'm waiting for the return of slim, readable books.
Every time I see people dismiss the X client/server model I have to laugh.
Laugh away. That doesn't change the fact that 99% of all desktop usage under Linux and 99.999% under Windows use a display directly connected to the PC.
"Windows Terminal Server" is the correct solution. You design for the common case, you do extra work for the odd case. Period. I know you'll dismiss this, I really do. And that's fine.
"Innovation" is coming up with something new and useful. None of these things you have listed qualifty as either; they have been done to death, and Microsoft is just catching up 20 years later.
I said "relatively speaking," and I even emphasized *relatively*. Microsoft is using new spins on old inventions to benefit the user. "Benefit" is the key. Arguing that X11 was a great architecture for 1985 does not benefit the user.
Perhaps, perhaps not. We see the fact that people do not comprehend the reasons for X and its design, and rather look to things like having transparent windows as a more useful "feature" than network transparency.
A perfect example. X11's key design feature is something that does not apply 99% of the time. It was a total and utter mistake from the days of many users connected to one mainframe or minicomputer. It is a non-issue for desktop use. Microsoft and Apple understand this. You design for the common case.
First, "open source community" needs to be clarified. I'm reading this as "Linux kernel, drivers, X11, Window managers, and desktop environments." In short, what repesents the OS to the user. "Open source" as a generic term is much too broad, because there are many open source projects for Windows, for example.
Back to the topic. Linux innovation hasn't been innovation as much as just getting things to a usable point. KDE has finally gotten very nice, where it's as comfortable to use as Windows 2000. There are finally better drivers for doing things 3D. There are some promising web browser projects that are moving away from the mess that Mozilla has become. But this is not innovation. This is simply what users expect.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has been more daring. They're attempting break free of the Win32 legacy with.net, even going for processor independence at the same time. Sure, Java and many other virtual machines have attempted this, but not at the OS level. *Relatively* speaking, this is a bigger attempt at simplification and moving into the future than what we've seen happening with Linux. And as much as I don't want to like C#, it's a spot-on design. It's like making a much enhanced version of Delphi be the standard method of developing applications, and it's going to get rid of all the confusion about MFC, Visual Basic-specific forms, and so on. From a language design viewpoint, C# is more solid and pragmatic than Java.
For unknown reasons, Linux seems to attract conservative thinkers. Any time replacing X11 comes up, there will be vehement advocates insisting that It Is The Way and that we shouldn't replace something that works. And so it goes. Twenty years from now we'll still be using X11.
Heck, my wife is a CS woman (and I'll say she's a hottie). I've worked with plenty of women programmers over the years, too.
The difference is this: CS women don't obsess over Perl vs. Python, Windows vs. Linux, and all that. They don't view geek-hobbyist stuff, like reinstalling Debian and comparison shopping window managers and all that to be relevant. They simply get off on the problem solving and do what they need to do, staying outside of modern geek circles. In that respect they're more pure geeks, interested in how things work and how to get things done, rather than messing with the whole faux-elite Slashdot computer-science-means-hacking-emacs-scripts kind of crowd. And this applies to lots of guys as well.
If you had a brain, you'd look outside your narrow little view of the world and realize that the Opteron is NOT designed for the "average person"!!!
Right, and the 386 is designed only for use in servers (as were the 486 and Pentium). The posters general point is correct, in that all CPUs in the current generation and from this point forward are hugely inefficient in terms of power usage, heat dissipation, and packaging. On top of that, they're not designed to do anything particularly well. They're huge, do-everything processors. This is why a graphics processor running at 1/10 the clock speed of a CPU can outprocess a high-end P4 by an order of magnitude.
If you think that the Opteron is a weird exception, and that upcoming processors are going to be much more energy efficient, then you're wrong. The problem is only getting worse. Transmeta's Astro provides a bit of hope at least.
Um, I don't think so. The first first-person perspective game I remember is BattleZone, published in 1983. The first first-person shooter I recall is Xybots (or maybe you'd call it 3rd person), published in 1987.
First, Battlezone is from 1980. There were 1st person games in the 1970s, specifically a few games for the PLATO system.
Online games need to be optimized, no matter what connection the programmers would prefer. There's still plenty of lag on broadband when playing games, and a lot of it has to do with unoptimized code (which normally is fixed later down the road via patches on the PC).
This is largely a myth. "Optimize," in regard to network code, means "fool the user into thinking it's faster." There is nothing you can do to get rid of network lag. It's a fact of life. So what game developers do is play tricks to make you think the lag has gone away, and each of these tricks doesn't work in some cases. A classic fudge is to predict where an opponent will be in X milliseconds, based on his last known movement characteristics. If the prediction is right, then everything is grand. Hopefully it will be more right than wrong. But it can still be wrong.
Yes, there's also the issue of reducing packet size, but that's pretty mechanical. And even if you could reduce the entire state of a client to 1 bit, then there's still going to be lag time. Period.
I guess that explains all those chips out there for video compression and speech recognition...moron.
Look before you post. There are lots of video compression chips out there. The market for them as PC add-ons is deemed high-end at the moment, but I don't expect that to last for long.
The bottom line is, we are using general purpose processors for these types of applications because once the code is hardwired into silicon, it can't be changed. And FPGA's are still too expensive.
FPGAs are cheaper than the alternative. Look, we're talking about people who claim that paying $1000 for a new processor that gives them a 9% speed increase is cost effective.
I see the usual replies claiming that 1GHz is more than fast enough and the usual critical replies citing video editing and speed recognition. Now while I can agree that more speed is often good, are these really examples where it makes a lot of sense to buy hot, expensive, and power hungry general purpose CPUs to handle special purpose tasks? 3D graphics didn't wait for processors to hit 20GHz, but a 300MHz graphics processor can outrun any general purpose CPU. Video editing is another good example. Why is it so slow? Because it involves compressing lots of data. A team of graduate students could create an FPGA that runs rings around a P4 for video compression (by, say, a factor of 20). Speech recognition is the same way.
In short, paying $1000+ for a processor that's 9% faster and uses 15% more power is not a good solution for "I need more power for video editing," especially when you should be able to get 20x-50x performance increases for 10% of the cost.
python isn't even remotely comparable to (common) lisp as a general purpose language. CL is about as efficient as c++ (say +/- 10% or even 20%) with a decent compiler.
Did you even read Graham's article? Much of his point is that functionality and expressiveness are more important than speed, especially in the long run. You're judging languages based on implementation performance, not the languages themselves.
Paul Graham is a wonderful writer, and he's one of the few people who won't hold back his unpopular opinions (OOP is often without substance, dynamic typing is important), but he does have his biases. Specifically, all of his essays can be boiled down to editorials promoting Lisp (or his own Lisp-like language, Arc). In the case of this article, it was for a Python conference, so he toned down the Lisp advocacy.
I don't see his article as being about programming languages 100 years in the future. Most of his talk applies to languages that have been around for a long time, but which still aren't as widely used as Perl and C++. Or you could think of it as being about programming languages 5 years in the future. Lisp certainly was less useful on an 8MHz 68000, but on a 3GHz Pentium 4 it's amazing. Ditto for Python. You could write most commercial games in Lisp or Python on such a machine, with the rendering handled by any recent graphics card, and you would be oh, so fine. So in five years when 10GHz is the norm, this is only going to be even more true. At some point it will be obvious that the "C++ for everything" diehards have become rather silly.
PC's in any form will not be replaced by anything that cannot beat it in gaming quality.
Fanatical PC gamers are a small minority of PC owners. Once the next round of network aware, HDTV only game consoles hits, then that will be it for most PC game development. Quite possibly it won't take much to turn these consoles into pseudo-PCs that allow for mods and such.
Who wouldn't build their own database website. Imagine slogging through hundreds of pages of fixed html. Does anyone know of sites like these other than personal pages put up by newbies? All of my sites are at least dynamic using php.
You make things as flexible and dynamic as possible on your (the webmaster's) end, then you process everything into static pages. This moves all of the heavy-lifting offline. This will cover most sites.
Hmmmmmmm.... I don't know about you, but between Borland's products and MS's, I would say that Borland beats MS hands down, it's not even funny.
Borland is in a bad position. Delphi is/was great for a couple of big reasons: (1) the language was much cleaner and less headache causing than C and C++; (2) you could create slick GUIs with little effort, especially when compared with raw Win32 calls and MFC. But now both of these wins are fundamental parts of the C#/.net combination. You could stick with Delphi for.net, but why? The language is going to have to be retrofitted to include all of the new.net features, and in all honesty, Microsoft has has the advantage in that they could design things mostly from scratch, so they ditched lots of legacy language problems when designing C#.
I'll always have a soft spot for Borland's compilers, but I don't think they're going to transition to.net well at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Desktops are starting to be much less critical than they once were, especially at home. The move is to portable devices--fancy PDAs, web-browsing cell phones. Desktop PCs are still important and useful, but stop and think and realize that 90% of desktop use is for a handful of applications: word processing, spreadsheets, email, web browsing, photo and video editing, etc. Quite frankly there isn't much need for more applications in these areas at the moment. Someone buys a PC, they get Word or Photoshop, and they're done with software. Games are a lot more disposable, but consoles rule the day there. The embedded computer market is growing like crazy, of course.
Because gaming software seems to be at as healthy a level as it has ever been.
Actually, gaming has been hurting for a few years now. Most of the little developers let themselves be bought out rather than go under. And unfortunately it's only a minority of big hit games that make money. People love to say "Look at Grand Theft Auto 3 and Splinter Cell!" but those are the exceptions.
Then why are you on Slashdot? Pretty much the same stuff. At least the kids can get together and do it in person.
The point is that you don't need a club for that. If you're going to go through the trouble of having one, for goodness sake don't just create a live version of Slashdot forums. You can already get enough of that on the web.
At one time a general computer club kinda made sense. This was before the web and before there were good magazines or books on particular topics (for example, programming graphics on the Apple II circa 1980).
Now, you need a point. Is the point to learn to write computer games? Is the point to learn different programming languages? Is the point to learn about security? Is the point to learn about system administration? Just getting together to yap about AMD vs. Intel and Linux distros and all that is pretty worthless. Computers are tools. Focus on how those tools will help you in a particular task or endeavor, not the tools themselves.
Most people miss the big picture for .net because of Microsoft's early hype about web services. Here's the overall plan:
.net framework as possible, stop updating the Win32 API and mark it deprecated (doesn't mean you can't use it, but the official word will be to avoid it for new development). Eventually start changing the underlying system to be something other than Win32, essentially making Windows be a .net environment. This is how Microsoft is going to deal with eventually getting rid of the crusty old Win32 API.
.net, the processor is irrelevant. You can write applications for .net and get them running on Pocket PCs and other devices with minimal effort. Remember, Microsoft supports SH4, MIPS, PowerPC, and ARM processors for Windows CE.
.net is simply going to cause you pain. The sooner you get comfortable with it the better.
1. Move as much Windows programming to the
2. Now that everyone is writing for
In short, avoiding
... at least for now. .NET is a "good" idea in theory. But it's performance is just not up to par compared to the execution times of applications using .NET vs C++.
.net is The Way, but it is at least one possible way.
Of course now there are commercial games being written in Blitz Basic and Python+SDL+Pygame, plus a huge number of games in recent years, even on consoles, include interpreted scripting languages. With 2GHz behind you and a graphics card that does all of the heavy visual lifting, people sticking to C++ for everything are just causing themselves extra pain. That's not to say
I've seen quite a number of Carmack postings...
Right, but they're a relative few. If you search, you'll probably only see a dozen at most. That's different than someone who jumps into any and all discussions.
This is a problem with all web discussions, too. There are people with vast, relevant experience--or at least people with reasoned views--and then you have idealistic college students (or these days, junior high school students) arguing with them. Of course no one ever listens to anything, so the arguments are completely pointless, but the ironic part is that once the younger posters grow up a bit, they often discover that, yes, they were wrong.
More and more I'm realizing that all discussion forums, except privately run invitation-only mailing lists, are an utter waste of time. They're great when you're a newbie in a field and don't know a whole lot, but after a while it becomes obvious that the people with the real knowledge stay away. You don't see Kay, Knuth, Kernigan, Carmack, or even Torvalds obsessively reading and posting on Slashdot forums.
(Yes, I'm fully aware of the irony of posting this to Slashdot.)
I guess we've all gotten used to artificially inflated monster technical books, where it's expected that Learn Java 2 in 24 Hours needs to be 950 pages or it's crap.
Here's a clue: Those big books are hugely padded by:
1. Large margins so there can be a little note every few pages.
2. Repeated program listings, also with huge margins.
3. A hundred or more pages of fluffy introductory chapters ("What is a programming language?").
4. Massive redundancy.
Personally I'm waiting for the return of slim, readable books.
Every time I see people dismiss the X client/server model I have to laugh.
Laugh away. That doesn't change the fact that 99% of all desktop usage under Linux and 99.999% under Windows use a display directly connected to the PC.
"Windows Terminal Server" is the correct solution. You design for the common case, you do extra work for the odd case. Period. I know you'll dismiss this, I really do. And that's fine.
"Innovation" is coming up with something new and useful. None of these things you have listed qualifty as either; they have been done to death, and Microsoft is just catching up 20 years later.
I said "relatively speaking," and I even emphasized *relatively*. Microsoft is using new spins on old inventions to benefit the user. "Benefit" is the key. Arguing that X11 was a great architecture for 1985 does not benefit the user.
Perhaps, perhaps not. We see the fact that people do not comprehend the reasons for X and its design, and rather look to things like having transparent windows as a more useful "feature" than network transparency.
A perfect example. X11's key design feature is something that does not apply 99% of the time. It was a total and utter mistake from the days of many users connected to one mainframe or minicomputer. It is a non-issue for desktop use. Microsoft and Apple understand this. You design for the common case.
First, "open source community" needs to be clarified. I'm reading this as "Linux kernel, drivers, X11, Window managers, and desktop environments." In short, what repesents the OS to the user. "Open source" as a generic term is much too broad, because there are many open source projects for Windows, for example.
.net, even going for processor independence at the same time. Sure, Java and many other virtual machines have attempted this, but not at the OS level. *Relatively* speaking, this is a bigger attempt at simplification and moving into the future than what we've seen happening with Linux. And as much as I don't want to like C#, it's a spot-on design. It's like making a much enhanced version of Delphi be the standard method of developing applications, and it's going to get rid of all the confusion about MFC, Visual Basic-specific forms, and so on. From a language design viewpoint, C# is more solid and pragmatic than Java.
Back to the topic. Linux innovation hasn't been innovation as much as just getting things to a usable point. KDE has finally gotten very nice, where it's as comfortable to use as Windows 2000. There are finally better drivers for doing things 3D. There are some promising web browser projects that are moving away from the mess that Mozilla has become. But this is not innovation. This is simply what users expect.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has been more daring. They're attempting break free of the Win32 legacy with
For unknown reasons, Linux seems to attract conservative thinkers. Any time replacing X11 comes up, there will be vehement advocates insisting that It Is The Way and that we shouldn't replace something that works. And so it goes. Twenty years from now we'll still be using X11.
Heck, my wife is a CS woman (and I'll say she's a hottie). I've worked with plenty of women programmers over the years, too.
The difference is this: CS women don't obsess over Perl vs. Python, Windows vs. Linux, and all that. They don't view geek-hobbyist stuff, like reinstalling Debian and comparison shopping window managers and all that to be relevant. They simply get off on the problem solving and do what they need to do, staying outside of modern geek circles. In that respect they're more pure geeks, interested in how things work and how to get things done, rather than messing with the whole faux-elite Slashdot computer-science-means-hacking-emacs-scripts kind of crowd. And this applies to lots of guys as well.
If you had a brain, you'd look outside your narrow little view of the world and realize that the Opteron is NOT designed for the "average person"!!!
Right, and the 386 is designed only for use in servers (as were the 486 and Pentium). The posters general point is correct, in that all CPUs in the current generation and from this point forward are hugely inefficient in terms of power usage, heat dissipation, and packaging. On top of that, they're not designed to do anything particularly well. They're huge, do-everything processors. This is why a graphics processor running at 1/10 the clock speed of a CPU can outprocess a high-end P4 by an order of magnitude.
If you think that the Opteron is a weird exception, and that upcoming processors are going to be much more energy efficient, then you're wrong. The problem is only getting worse. Transmeta's Astro provides a bit of hope at least.
Um, I don't think so. The first first-person perspective game I remember is BattleZone, published in 1983. The first first-person shooter I recall is Xybots (or maybe you'd call it 3rd person), published in 1987.
First, Battlezone is from 1980. There were 1st person games in the 1970s, specifically a few games for the PLATO system.
Online games need to be optimized, no matter what connection the programmers would prefer. There's still plenty of lag on broadband when playing games, and a lot of it has to do with unoptimized code (which normally is fixed later down the road via patches on the PC).
This is largely a myth. "Optimize," in regard to network code, means "fool the user into thinking it's faster." There is nothing you can do to get rid of network lag. It's a fact of life. So what game developers do is play tricks to make you think the lag has gone away, and each of these tricks doesn't work in some cases. A classic fudge is to predict where an opponent will be in X milliseconds, based on his last known movement characteristics. If the prediction is right, then everything is grand. Hopefully it will be more right than wrong. But it can still be wrong.
Yes, there's also the issue of reducing packet size, but that's pretty mechanical. And even if you could reduce the entire state of a client to 1 bit, then there's still going to be lag time. Period.
What exactly is the Poincare Conjecture anyway?
You don't need to ask Slashdot. Google is your friend.
I guess that explains all those chips out there for video compression and speech recognition...moron.
Look before you post. There are lots of video compression chips out there. The market for them as PC add-ons is deemed high-end at the moment, but I don't expect that to last for long.
The bottom line is, we are using general purpose processors for these types of applications because once the code is hardwired into silicon, it can't be changed. And FPGA's are still too expensive.
FPGAs are cheaper than the alternative. Look, we're talking about people who claim that paying $1000 for a new processor that gives them a 9% speed increase is cost effective.
I see the usual replies claiming that 1GHz is more than fast enough and the usual critical replies citing video editing and speed recognition. Now while I can agree that more speed is often good, are these really examples where it makes a lot of sense to buy hot, expensive, and power hungry general purpose CPUs to handle special purpose tasks? 3D graphics didn't wait for processors to hit 20GHz, but a 300MHz graphics processor can outrun any general purpose CPU. Video editing is another good example. Why is it so slow? Because it involves compressing lots of data. A team of graduate students could create an FPGA that runs rings around a P4 for video compression (by, say, a factor of 20). Speech recognition is the same way.
In short, paying $1000+ for a processor that's 9% faster and uses 15% more power is not a good solution for "I need more power for video editing," especially when you should be able to get 20x-50x performance increases for 10% of the cost.
python isn't even remotely comparable to (common) lisp as a general purpose language. CL is about as efficient as c++ (say +/- 10% or even 20%) with a decent compiler.
Did you even read Graham's article? Much of his point is that functionality and expressiveness are more important than speed, especially in the long run. You're judging languages based on implementation performance, not the languages themselves.
Paul Graham is a wonderful writer, and he's one of the few people who won't hold back his unpopular opinions (OOP is often without substance, dynamic typing is important), but he does have his biases. Specifically, all of his essays can be boiled down to editorials promoting Lisp (or his own Lisp-like language, Arc). In the case of this article, it was for a Python conference, so he toned down the Lisp advocacy.
I don't see his article as being about programming languages 100 years in the future. Most of his talk applies to languages that have been around for a long time, but which still aren't as widely used as Perl and C++. Or you could think of it as being about programming languages 5 years in the future. Lisp certainly was less useful on an 8MHz 68000, but on a 3GHz Pentium 4 it's amazing. Ditto for Python. You could write most commercial games in Lisp or Python on such a machine, with the rendering handled by any recent graphics card, and you would be oh, so fine. So in five years when 10GHz is the norm, this is only going to be even more true. At some point it will be obvious that the "C++ for everything" diehards have become rather silly.
in his now famous Turing Award lecture: "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"
PC's in any form will not be replaced by anything that cannot beat it in gaming quality.
Fanatical PC gamers are a small minority of PC owners. Once the next round of network aware, HDTV only game consoles hits, then that will be it for most PC game development. Quite possibly it won't take much to turn these consoles into pseudo-PCs that allow for mods and such.
Who wouldn't build their own database website. Imagine slogging through hundreds of pages of fixed html. Does anyone know of sites like these other than personal pages put up by newbies? All of my sites are at least dynamic using php.
You make things as flexible and dynamic as possible on your (the webmaster's) end, then you process everything into static pages. This moves all of the heavy-lifting offline. This will cover most sites.
Hmmmmmmm.... I don't know about you, but between Borland's products and MS's, I would say that Borland beats MS hands down, it's not even funny.
.net, but why? The language is going to have to be retrofitted to include all of the new .net features, and in all honesty, Microsoft has has the advantage in that they could design things mostly from scratch, so they ditched lots of legacy language problems when designing C#.
.net well at all.
Borland is in a bad position. Delphi is/was great for a couple of big reasons: (1) the language was much cleaner and less headache causing than C and C++; (2) you could create slick GUIs with little effort, especially when compared with raw Win32 calls and MFC. But now both of these wins are fundamental parts of the C#/.net combination. You could stick with Delphi for
I'll always have a soft spot for Borland's compilers, but I don't think they're going to transition to