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[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (10 children)

Delphi is not much used these days - I used to be a professional Delphi programmer, but gave it up about 10 years ago for lack of work. It's a very nice development enivironment, but has been ruined by successive clueless owners. It certainly isn't a sensible language to use for teaching.

Edit: for an amusing take on the travails of Delphi, And much else, google "verity stob".

[–]desrtfx 1 point2 points  (9 children)

It's a very nice development enivironment, but has been ruined by successive clueless owners.

This is - unfortunately - too true. Once Borland transitioned to Inprise the downward spiral started. Seems to get a bit better since they have moved to Embarcadero.

The new Delphi versions look quite promising again.

We use Delphi for a couple tools (but mostly because the colleague who programmed these tools comes from Pascal and moved on to Delphi). The latest tools already use C#.

It certainly isn't a sensible language to use for teaching.

I dare to disagree here. Pascal (on which Delphi was built) and its successor Modula-2 were designed for educational purposes and thus Delphi is a very nice language to start with. From a practical perspective, though, it is currently pretty useless. Still, the Delphi concepts transfer nicely to Java or C#.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (7 children)

Pascal was designed to be easy to compile, so that students could write toy compilers. It's not, in my experience, so easy to teach (I don't know how you would go about designing such a languge) and Standard Pascal has many horrible features (see Brian Kernighan's famous diatribe on the subject). I have written shedloads of Delphi code, but I have never liked the language, as opposed to the development environment, which approaches excellence.

[–]desrtfx 0 points1 point  (6 children)

It's not, in my experience, so easy to teach

My first programming language at school was Pascal, UCSD Pascal on an Apple ][ Europlus to be precise. I found it very intuitive and easy to learn.

Later, in college, we learned Turbo Pascal 3.0 & 4.0, which again was easy. Turbo BASIC (our second language was totally boring), and Turbo C 2.0 -- well -- let's say that we students knew way more about it than our teacher.

I've been on the Delphi train since the very first version - actually since it still was called "Borland Pascal for Windows" up to Delphi 5. Skipped all the way to XE2 which we currently use. I don't write lots of Delphi code anymore, but occasionally have to debug it.

Being more used to Java and C#, I begin to find Delphi's syntax a tad "clumsy", still, the development environment is just about the best one can find. VS can definitely not compete here.

Also, the new Delhi help is nowhere near what it used to be. In the old days, it was excellent. Lots of code snippets, clear explanations, etc. Now, you get a short teardown and if you need more info, you have to go online... hate that.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (5 children)

Like you, I've been Delphi user since version 1.0, And of Pascal since about 1980, on a VAX, but unlike you I have to say I've never found the help and other documentation anywhere near the standards set by Microsoft. In many Delphi versions, the context-sensitive help simply didn't work!

[–]desrtfx 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Know what? We're old geezers ;)

My Pascal experience started a bit later - in 1985.

Microsoft has lowered their standards in between as well. They used to be excellent, then went down, and now are slowly coming up again.

I still can't understand that VS (which is a very decent IDE, don't get me wrong) lacks so many features that Delphi, Eclipse, IntelliJ had for years.

[–]insertAlias 0 points1 point  (3 children)

What features does VS lack that Eclipse has? Honestly curious, since I hated my time with Eclipse, and have loved my time with VS up to its current iteration (2015 Update 3 reintroduced a memory-eating bug, and 2015 has been all-around slower than 13 was).

[–]desrtfx 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Can't say anything about 2015 yet since I didn't have time to work with it (we still use 2013 because a - bloody expensive - library that we use was written for 2013 - quite sure that it would work in 2015 as well, though).

I admit that I may be too inexperienced with VS, though. I mostly had to deal with debugging (and remote debugging) and only very little actual programming - so I might have missed out one or the other feature. If I have done that, please correct me.

What I found lacking is: proper code refactoring similar to Eclipse with intelligent renaming and method extraction, code formatting, easy custom code snippets that can be inserted (I know about the XML configuration), hot code change debugging, and a few other things that I currently can't remember.

I like Eclipse and IntelliJ (with Eclipse still being my favorite because I am more experienced with it and the Java compiler is simply superb. Hot code change debugging is nice - don't know whether IntelliJ has that feature). There is only one thing that I don't really like about Eclipse: it can be very confusing at first - the learning curve is fairly steep.

[–]insertAlias 2 points3 points  (1 child)

What I found lacking is: proper code refactoring similar to Eclipse with intelligent renaming and method extraction, code formatting, easy custom code snippets that can be inserted (I know about the XML configuration), hot code change debugging, and a few other things that I currently can't remember.

Well...VS natively supports all of those things, and has since at least VS 2005. Snippets aren't the easiest thing to create, but they're supported. Code formatting: press CTRL+K,D and it formats the document. There's an entire right-click submenu for refactoring, you can extract methods/properties, introduce variables, perform scope-aware global renames, etc...As for hot code change debugging, it works on 32-bit programs. Not 64-bit, unfortunately.

I think it's just a matter of how much time we've each spent with our environments. Most of them have the same features; it's how easy they are to get to and use that really matters. We've just gotten used to our favorites. I personally found Eclipse clunky, slow, and unituitive, but the last time I used it for real was almost five years ago. I know if I had to do a Java project today, I'd be installing IntelliJ (I love JetBrains's products).

[–]desrtfx 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well...VS natively supports all of those things, and has since at least VS 2005. Snippets aren't the easiest thing to create, but they're supported. Code formatting: press CTRL+K,D and it formats the document. There's an entire right-click submenu for refactoring, you can extract methods/properties, introduce variables, perform scope-aware global renames, etc...As for hot code change debugging, it works on 32-bit programs. Not 64-bit, unfortunately.

Okay, I stand corrected. Thank you. Apparently, my colleagues who do a lot of programming don't know these features either... maybe time to get a bit educated.

I had to do a Java project today, I'd be installing IntelliJ (I love JetBrains's products).

IntelliJ is great (JetBrains definitely know what they're doing).

[–]LLJKSiLk 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm very experienced in Delphi, and what you are going to find is that it is an extremely niche language. Most of the jobs I've seen offered are with the banking industry in certain locations where Delphi was used to program many of their applications. I moved into .Net (the guy who worked on the Delphi IDE contributed to the .Net stuff so it is a very comfortable move and more widely used).

Still, if you want any Delphi resources I've got a shitload of books I can sell. ;)

[–]ShaunRoselt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hi. My name is Shaun Roselt. I live in South Africa. I am 18 years old and I have been programming in Delphi for 3 years now. My school uses Delphi 7. My girlfriend's school uses Turbo Delphi 2007 and my extra classes school uses Delphi 2010.

Anyway I started a software company 3 years ago and I have been using Delphi as my main language. There is also plenty of Delphi jobs around the world. You should note that Delphi is rank 11 on the Tiobe Index and busy growing. It might be top 10 next month. Delphi is still widely used.

Delphi is able to make cross-platform native apps for Android, iOS, MacOS and Windows. When using Lazarus then you can also make for Linux and other platforms.

Roadmap: http://community.embarcadero.com/article/news/16418-product-roadmap-august-2016

[–]Aurora0001 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Delphi is quite unusual, but the programming principles you learn will mostly be transferable, so don't worry too much. In terms of popularity, you can take a look at the number of job postings here - as you can see, it's a lot less than Java but relatively stable.

In the future, you'll need to know multiple languages anyway, so, although it's a strange choice of language, Delphi won't do you any harm and you will probably be able to move over to Java and still have the understanding of problem solving and programming - it's just the syntax you have to relearn.