Re: God I Love Delphi7

From: Andrea Raimondi (rainaple_at_tin.it)
Date: 12/21/04 

Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 08:55:56 +0100

David Farrell-Garcia wrote:

> You misunderstood my posts. I find Delphi to be very productive. One
> of my original complaints about .Net was that you had to write to darn
> much code to wire up databindings. That has pretty much been addressed
> in VS.Net 2005. My ONLY point is that .Net is indeed good. I have never
> said that Delphi is bad or not as productive as coding in .Net.

Ok, we're speaking of the framework, right? So - DEVELOPMENT TOOOLS -
help you write less code with dotNET(even though with Delphi you could
create a GUI application *without* using the designer and coding
text DFMs yourself... yeah, not really a good idea maybe, but for
small test applications it may even be feasible).

dotNET itself doesn't make you write less code. Ok.
That demonstrates that MS lied. Again.

> You seem to confuse talking about .Net as a platform and .Net
> development tools. Two totally different topics.

Exactly. With the difference that *MS* did create dotNET, so the
question remains: how many "parts" of dotNET were not
designed/implemented in an optimal way? That is, in a way that
allows you to be productive without needing huge tools?

Please consider that, wanting to do it, Delphi allows you to
create entire component sets only with Notepad, no need for
other things. To do them, I use Delphi IDE only because of the
help system and class browser. But I could do without the IDE
easily.

So, now, who's easy to use?

> Well, I have no way of knowing myself, but you may want to take a look
> at one of my earlier posts today where I posed a link from MSDN where
> they said that all future Windows applcations, starting with Longhorn
> will be developed primarily from managed .Net classes. You can read
> whatever you want into that but for me it is quite clear and in sync
> with what has been said at several conferences I attended.

David, please, use *your* brain. Native code can't simply be ripped
apart, because the *DARN CLR*, just to say one, *must* run in native
code. Honestly, I also don't beleive that future versions of
Windows will just have dotNET classes, because core parts of it
*will* have to run in native code, the Kernel for example.
As I said, you *can't* just abandon native code, unless you
have CPUs that allow to interpret MSIL directly, but in that
case, see, it's native code again.
No way around it.

> Yes, and?

And as I'm keeping demonstrating native code is here to stay.

> The loading thing again? What has that got to do with anything.
> Delphi is no fast loading IDE either when you have a substantial number
> of components on the Pallete.

"Substantial number of components on the palette" is the key here.
Yes, if you have a thousand components Delphi slows down, just as
Thunderbird does when you have heavy newsgroups with huge amount of
posts. And, be aware, I'm talking about "clean" installs.
Then, even with a plethora of components, Delphi loads faster <g>.

> I don't follow you there.

Simple: with Delphi, I developed an application interacting with ADO
connection string wizard. Handy if you want to support multiple
databases without the need to use lots of components.

I can't do it with ADO.NET because the editor comes only with VS.

> says who?

Whoever had the chance to use it :-)
You compile it once, no need to compile each time.

> Not at all and pretty much the same thing has been said by many .Net
> developers. I develop both .Net and Delphi Win32 so have no real bias
> so I have no reason to give slanted answers. A well designed .Net app
> is not so much slower then a native Delphi app as to be an issue.
> Period.

On server machines, we can agree on this.
On *modern* hardware, we can also agree on this.
But with older one, let me free of *highly* doubting this.

Darn, with older hardware it's already complicated to run
Win2KPro, imagine dotNET. Not to speak about the fact that,
theorically, dotNET would *run* on W98 too... LOL!
That's a really good joke.

> A really bad analogy.

Ok, better one: what if you had to *COMPILE* Delphi each time
before running it? Would it be fun? Or Office? Or any other
fairly large application, for that matter.

> I really think that you must have never tried developing a .Net
> application or you are just exagerating the startup time. Yes it is a
> bit slower, but I find it faster then starting up a Java app and Java
> seems to have a huge following.

And I really think you're not answering my question: what is the average
configuration of your customers' PCs?

Other questions, too: do you interact with RS232 ports?
Do you do any USB programming? How about sending escape
commands to the printer?

I'm also glad to see that you skipped gracefully several statements
there were no arguments to reply with.

Do you feel like continuing on this? :-P

Cheers,

Andrew 

--
Online thoughts blog
http://araimondi.blogspot.com

Relevant Pages

  • Re: God I Love Delphi7
    ... show me where I'm writing *less code* with dotNET. ... Delphi *as usual*. ... "MS did NOT do as good a job as Borland as far as abstracting the visual ... Even dotNET, eventually turns bytecode into NATIVE CODE, so... ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: need clarification
    ... > As it goes right now, Delphi is heading towards a .NET state. ... using Win32 Delphi aren't necessarily interested in Win32, but Native code. ... Innovation will continue outside of .NET. ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: Delphi Product Manager questioned
    ... Delphi was able to do "more" than MS in many areas, ... I beleive this can happen again with dotNET, ... it ignores the more recent historical events of BDS' current .NET support. ... Tough decisions have to be made in tough ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: 64-bit Windows for AMD 64 is here...
    ... > Indeed, but with no decent Win64 support in Delphi, only ... The problem I see with products like their dotNET ones is ... >> but the execution. ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: Best Blog Entry in Years
    ... the customers tell me they want to run in a safe environment as .NET code. ... Mixed mode compiler does not help here - and I do not want to rewrite all ... There is no different paradigm between native code and .NET code ... Strikes me as counter intuitive - if you have a large code base in Delphi ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)