> What type of application is that, in your opinion? Would you use it for a web-based app? (Many boring corporate apps are now web-based, and not just because the developers want that. The business people often want it too.)
I think this is mostly a lament of how very, very, very horrible web-based apps are for the developer. Delphi gets you pixel-perfect interfaces that work on a 486 with windows 95 right up to todays windows 8 (there is a version of delphi that would get you 3.1 support as well). With one recompile, the same app runs on android, ios. I have trouble writing a web-app that supports 2 browsers (and especially have not found a way to test that this is so without manually going through the app), yet every delphi app supports over 8 runtime environments.
> Modern languages don't particularly encourage or discourage that style of programming. Let's assume we're comparing Delphi to Ruby and Python as the modern competitors for the high-productivity, just-get-it-done language. Those languages have standard libraries with rather minimalist APIs, so I don't see the bloat there.
On the web there just isn't any other way of doing things. This is supposed to be flexible and "good" design, but here's the catch : changing one tiny thing in the backend requires you to change (e.g. go from 1 to 2 phone numbers per customer) :
1) the backend itself
2) the business rules in the second tier
3) the RPC/REST/... interface to the second tier
4) any and all frontend code interacting with this data
In delphi, by contrast, you change the backend, and that's it. At runtime, mind you, you don't even need a recompile in most cases. Tables will automatically start showing it, forms will magically contain the new field.
> I agree...this is not forced on us by modern languages, it is current culture/fashion. There are so many cool geegaws out there today, it would be a shame to not use them such that you can include that experience on your resume (to hell with the additional costs and complexity, let someone else worry about that.)
I think part of the question being asked here is "how do these help application development" ? How do they improve the applications ? Well, they make them worse.
I think this is mostly a lament of how very, very, very horrible web-based apps are for the developer. Delphi gets you pixel-perfect interfaces that work on a 486 with windows 95 right up to todays windows 8 (there is a version of delphi that would get you 3.1 support as well). With one recompile, the same app runs on android, ios. I have trouble writing a web-app that supports 2 browsers (and especially have not found a way to test that this is so without manually going through the app), yet every delphi app supports over 8 runtime environments.
> Modern languages don't particularly encourage or discourage that style of programming. Let's assume we're comparing Delphi to Ruby and Python as the modern competitors for the high-productivity, just-get-it-done language. Those languages have standard libraries with rather minimalist APIs, so I don't see the bloat there.
On the web there just isn't any other way of doing things. This is supposed to be flexible and "good" design, but here's the catch : changing one tiny thing in the backend requires you to change (e.g. go from 1 to 2 phone numbers per customer) :
1) the backend itself
2) the business rules in the second tier
3) the RPC/REST/... interface to the second tier
4) any and all frontend code interacting with this data
In delphi, by contrast, you change the backend, and that's it. At runtime, mind you, you don't even need a recompile in most cases. Tables will automatically start showing it, forms will magically contain the new field.
> I agree...this is not forced on us by modern languages, it is current culture/fashion. There are so many cool geegaws out there today, it would be a shame to not use them such that you can include that experience on your resume (to hell with the additional costs and complexity, let someone else worry about that.)
I think part of the question being asked here is "how do these help application development" ? How do they improve the applications ? Well, they make them worse.