The difference between self documenting code and documentation, is that documentation will show the intent of the coder where as the code will only show what the coder chose to write down. This is the essence of "Do what I want you to, not what I tell you to!".
Re:Delphi has always been under-rated
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Delphi Renaissance
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It has nothing to do with marketing or product quality, and everything to do with trust. In my experience IT managers for a fortune 500 company have to sell thier development platform to executives, VPs, or a committee of some sort. Which almost always has 0 developer input and ends up being completely driven by business oriented people with little or no direct IT/Software experience. These people might be presented with 2 choices: Borland blah or Microsoft blah. Now, imagine you are the president domestic development for ACME Widgets, and you have to decide what platform to base your entire company's software and financial future on. "Who is Borland anyway? - never heard of them. Oh, Microsoft, Hmm. Yeah, they make great stuff. Lets use them."
Unless you have some IT people that can really argue the benefits (and there are plenty), it's going to be MS every time.
Ever heard of XML. When it came out, I thought to myself what a dumb idea - lets take something efficient like a 1 byte signed integer and change it so that it can take up to 4 bytes to store. Plus the whole opening AND CLOSING a tag with the description - sheesh, why not put the whole tag in again: just in case! So converting from a legacy app to a modern app, the 1 byte value of -100 that meant temperature to me is now stored as "-100", and anyone can read it (maybe good, maybe bad). Thats 31 times the original binary size! Did anyone care? No. The first time I heard the phrase "XML Database" I almost fainted! And yet it came to be.
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The difference between self documenting code and documentation, is that documentation will show the intent of the coder where as the code will only show what the coder chose to write down. This is the essence of "Do what I want you to, not what I tell you to!".
It has nothing to do with marketing or product quality, and everything to do with trust. In my experience IT managers for a fortune 500 company have to sell thier development platform to executives, VPs, or a committee of some sort. Which almost always has 0 developer input and ends up being completely driven by business oriented people with little or no direct IT/Software experience. These people might be presented with 2 choices: Borland blah or Microsoft blah. Now, imagine you are the president domestic development for ACME Widgets, and you have to decide what platform to base your entire company's software and financial future on. "Who is Borland anyway? - never heard of them. Oh, Microsoft, Hmm. Yeah, they make great stuff. Lets use them."
Unless you have some IT people that can really argue the benefits (and there are plenty), it's going to be MS every time.
31 times the original size is with an opening and closing tag of temperature, which /. removed for me.
Ever heard of XML. When it came out, I thought to myself what a dumb idea - lets take something efficient like a 1 byte signed integer and change it so that it can take up to 4 bytes to store. Plus the whole opening AND CLOSING a tag with the description - sheesh, why not put the whole tag in again: just in case! So converting from a legacy app to a modern app, the 1 byte value of -100 that meant temperature to me is now stored as "-100", and anyone can read it (maybe good, maybe bad). Thats 31 times the original binary size! Did anyone care? No. The first time I heard the phrase "XML Database" I almost fainted! And yet it came to be.