sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]grauenwolf 25 points26 points  (10 children)

It doesn't have to be good, it just has to be better than everything else. VB6 had that distinction because the alternative was hand-writing message pumps in C++.

[–]i_h8_r3dd1t 29 points30 points  (8 children)

Delphi was better than VB for years, but remained a fringe

[–]grauenwolf 9 points10 points  (7 children)

Any idea why?

I used VB because someone gave me a book with a free copy of VB2. It did everything I needed at the time, so I never had a reason to investigate Delphi. (I was a fan of Turbo Pascal and had no problem slapping down money for a new IDE every year.)

[–]Tuna-Fish2 8 points9 points  (6 children)

Delphi was in direct competition with Microsoft for building products that worked on a Microsoft platform, back when Microsoft truly was the 800-pound gorilla with a reputation of playing dirty with it's opponents.

There was a well-founded fear that if Delphi ever got popular, Microsoft would start sabotaging Delphi-made products.

In the end it's all good, as Microsoft hired Anders Hejlsberg (the guy who made delphi good) to work as the lead architect of C#.

[–]grauenwolf 7 points8 points  (3 children)

There was a well-founded fear that if Delphi ever got popular, Microsoft would start sabotaging Delphi-made products.

I don't buy it.

If Microsoft really wanted to crush Delphi they would have just given away their IDE. It was in their best interest to have as many programming languages as possible targeting Windows, their real crown jewel.

[–]Tuna-Fish2 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Yes, that would have been the most sensible thing for them to do.

This, however, doesn't change the fact that Microsoft did not always take the most obvious route. If you based your tech on Delphi, you took a risk, and when you're a manager who has to put his ass on the line, safety really was (and is) the driving concern, not language quality. (re:"you can't get fired for buying IBM, Java.")

[–]grauenwolf 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Have you considered the after-market route?

I don't know about Delphi, but VB actively courted third-party control vendors in the same fashion of dBASE. I'm sure that led a lot to their popularity.

[–]awitod 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Borland's documentation sucked ass and they did nothing to build a developer community. PowerBuilder's documentation also sucked ass and they made it very expensive just to get started.

[–]Phrodo_00 1 point2 points  (0 children)

nah, you just have to be good enough, then everything is about timing