Re: What I Think Delphi Needs to Do to Survive

"Randy Magruder" <rmagruder@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:44123e58$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The choice of language is significant

Compared to library and platform knowledge, no it isn't.


You've missed the point. Before once you made the platform choice the
language choice was made for you - now you can have the choice if you want
it. In my case I am no longer as dependent on Delphi (a big plus with recent
events), but don't have to fall back on a C-heritage language.

I had a similar experience not so long ago with Palm development world. I
had no interest at all until PocketStudio came up with a Pascal-based
alternative to the otherwise C-dependent world.


if the programmer is knowledgable enough to use the full
capabilities of a particular
language, rather than just the subset similar to other languages he
has had experience with.

The language reflecs the platform. For instance, if I am using Delphi
code and I have this in a loop:

myLongString := myLongString + anotherChar;


That was my point. A knowledgeable Pascal programmer would not think of
doing it this way in Delphi.

And I do this in a loop (such as scanning a file), performance is going
to be dog slow. Not because of the language, but because in Win32 the
compiler is going to be doing a ton of memory allocations for that
ever-expanding string.

Don't confuse language *design* with language *implementation*. That may be
true for the languages you are familiar with but it is not a given.

The knowledge there comes from knowing how the
compiler is going to interpret the language. However, that assumption
may or may not be true for IL...because unless you know .NET CLR you
don't know how it manages strings. So how important is the syntax?

A professional .NET programmer must get to know .NET CLR , just like any
other platform in the past.

When you are just generating basically the same IL against a JITter,
the language differences have far less meaning. Yes, there is a
'familiarity' with the idioms of a language to take into account, but
this is trivial compared to the ever-growing sizes of libraries.

It is only trivial if the language syntax is sufficiently unambiguous /
non-complex so that the compiler is able to pick up any unintentionall
idiomatic errors at compile-time.

There's more learning to be done just picking up the workings of a
single grid component nowadays than there is in switching language
syntaxes.


That doesn't mean that language syntax is no longer important. It does mean
that you'll spend less time using the langauge to develop components and
have more time using it to solve application-specific problems.

The use of .NET makes the proper choice of a suitable language more
possible as it is more language-agnostic than other platforms (Win32,
say). In the past, the platform or framework was a much more
significant limiting factor in your choice.

That might be true if you're talking about coding LISP or Python, but
VB, C# and Pascal are so similar in structure and idiom where it comes
to procedural coding that it makes no real difference.


By Pascal I assume you mean Delphi (i.e. the language formerly known as
Object Pascal) ? C# and Pascal are worlds apart. I'd agree that Delphi, with
the ad-hoc language design approach used in its transition from Turbo Pascal
to where it is today, has diluted the qualities of original Pascal to have
more of the attributes of C# and other C-descendants. Conversely, a language
like Component Pascal, with its more disciplined evolutionary path from
Pascal being via Modula-2 and Oberon has improved on the qualities of
original Pascal (reliability, readaibility, maintainability and many other
abilities compared to C) while incorporating all the innovations required to
generated verified code in the .NET environment.

While Delphi is not available for .NET 2.0 then, by definition, it
cannot be a language of choice for that framework, whereas Chrome can.

And you gain basically nothing by using Chrome. May as well save
yourself the trouble and just use C#.


The same applies to VB. If what you say is true, why did Microsoft bother
with VB.NET?

--
Chris Burrows
CFB Software
http://www.cfbsoftware.com/gpcp





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