Re: Yo, Borland Marketing...

Eddie Shipman wrote:

> There was a guy at my last job, he was one of those midnighters, the
> kind with purple hair, 5'11", about 120 lbs, used to work for a game
> developer.

What have you got against purple hair? For those of us that can only
remember our hair, any color would be OK <g>.

>Well, they certainly screwed up the Clipper flagship and drove it into
>oblivion WITHOUT marketing.

Alas poor Clipper, I knew it well <g>. Actually, CA tried to replace
Clipper with CA Visual Objects. It would have been great if they had
any idea what they were doing. Clipper is still lurking around in
various guises as an open source database language.

> My first day on the job, I was asking him where the Delphi
> disks were located so I could intoall them. He goes into this diatribe
> about he couldn't understand how a "teaching language" such as Pascal
> could be used for serious development. Of course that raised the
> Microsoft Zealot flag instantly.

Pascal USED to be a teaching language but was inexplicably replaced by
'C' and its descendants, so that argument ended up to be pretty lame.
Borland should have gone out of its way to keep Pascal in the schools by
sending out tons of free/student versions of Delphi to schools just like
AOL floods the world with their installation disks. I realize that
Delphi was just emerging when Pascal was given the boot. When you are
taught a language in school, you tend to want to continue using it.
Instead, current CS students are brainwashed into thinking that 'C' must
be inherently faster and a better language to use since the O/S is
largely written in it. Actually, as far as I am concerned, all
languages are essentially equivalent in that they all must have the same
capabilities (branching, data handling, etc.). The differences are in
the details of the development platform such as the ide, compiler,
object model, simplicity of syntax, component libraries, etc. There
isn't anything you can do in 'C' that you can't do in Delphi, and with
no penalty in performance. You can probably say that about most
languages, but with Delphi, you can do it faster and with less pain.

Delphi is the one development platform that covers people like me (an
engineer turned programmer with no formal CS training) who would be hard
pressed to write a Windows program in any "Real Man's" language
(C/C++/C# & assembler) and yet still provides the power for the most
advanced programming gurus on the planet (most of the people in this group).

My theory is that all MS/C proponents are essentially macho masochists
at heart. Their philosophy appears to be 'Why write something in one
line with no pointers when you can spend all day doing it until blood
starts leaking out of your ears.' C# is obviously a knock-off of
Delphi, but the MS development platform is still inferior.

> When the mainstream VB'ers started that petition, THAT was the time
> Borland should have stood up and SHOUTED, "Hey, come over here and see
> what we can do for you!". They should have written some VB->Delphi
> conversion tools, wrote conversion guides, etc. It would have been a
> HUGE deal to the VB'ers seeing that someone was actually listening
> to them because we all know that M$ has totally ignored the petition
> and their arguments.

Right. Even a VB-er could learn Delphi, if they really worked hard <gg>.


Mark J. Wallin, Ph.D.
"Walloon"
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Over 100 Microsoft MVPs Have Signed Online Petition - Give Us Back VB!!
    ... My prime interest is *language* stability. ... "VB data controls" are com controls, ... > I wouldn't ever want to use them in Delphi - or in VB; ... My code is core to the app, business logic that is focused on the market I ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: VB6, VB2005, or Something Else?
    ... up" the language rather than any requirement of the platform change. ... the site seems to have articles from Borland too. ... don't understand is that you are moving completely to Delphi. ... including a fundamental data type. ...
    (microsoft.public.vb.general.discussion)
  • Re: Definition of outdated...
    ... There are often a reference to a programming language to be 'outdated', ... Looking strictly at the wording, then Java is more outdated than Delphi, ... What imo should be outdated is how money controls hype that controls ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: The War On HLA
    ... Take a look at the HLA compile-time language. ... Macros can be abused just like any other language feature. ... I find it amusing, however, that HLL programmers (e.g., Delphi, ... > feature is left to the programmer to invent his own uses for. ...
    (alt.lang.asm)
  • Re: Starting with VB2005 and SQL Server 2008 Express Edition
    ... As far as a "Development Platform" you are at the cross-roads of several ... soul-proprietors of the language and they can do with it as they will. ... VBA is a sub-set of VB "Visual Basic" the original VB ... This included versions VB1.1 to VB6. ...
    (microsoft.public.vb.database)