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Why C# coders should shut up about Delphi (2016)

by tones411 on 5/27/20, 5:06 AM with 157 comments

• by trixie_ on 5/27/20, 5:36 AM

  It's hard being an old programmer as some technologies that you used in the past, that were more productive than certain technologies today, are no longer popular. Creating client side apps in the 90s was arguably easier than creating web apps today with the soup of html/css/js frameworks that are changing every month.

  edit/mass reply: I've been coding web apps with the rest of you guys for 20 years. The web isn't the problem, the tooling just isn't there yet. The solution space is large and we're still in the 'throw things at the wall' stage. It will eventually be figured out and web dev will be nice and stable just like the backend and database layers.

• by ComputerGuru on 5/27/20, 5:35 AM

  It’s a really good crash course on the shared origins of Delphi and C# plus a brief reminder of all the modern features offered by Delphi that have flown under the radar, but the anger and emotion is rather immature and really detracts from the argument. Those words could have been better spent selling its strengths further.

  That aside, things have changed rapidly in the last five years in the C#/.NET world first with .NET Native then with .NET Core and CoreRT. Exciting times, really.

• by johnny_reilly on 5/27/20, 5:49 AM

  I love this post. My first gig was slinging Delphi for a telecoms company, my second was C# and I've been involved with TypeScript since it was announced. I'm a complete fan of Anders Hejlsberg work. To the extent that I gave genuine consideration to naming one of my son's "Anders". My wife was not onboard.

• by greatgib on 5/27/20, 6:49 AM

  > Some people seem to think that Delphi ended with version 7 back in the 90s

  For me it is the case. Before Delphi was a really the greatest, smartest and easiest RAD IDE. I even think that today dev tools are in a bad state and nothing match what we once had back then! Especialy for creating 'responsive' Gui apps easily.

  Then, as shitty companies always do, they changed completely the tool and the language with the new bad .net like one. Despite it to be wrong, they claimed that this was better than what we had before and forced it on users. But it was not anymore the Pascal Object that we liked!

• by rblatz on 5/27/20, 5:23 AM

  This is one heck of a rant. I couldn’t make it through to the end to see if he ever got to the point.

• by boznz on 5/27/20, 5:42 AM

  as a delphi Programmer who works next to a C# programmer we agree to agree that neither of us will ever use the others shit language, we also agree that all the other languages are worse :-)

• by Animats on 5/27/20, 5:55 AM

  Delphi is one of those languages which was a good product from a failing company - Borland. Just as Modula 3 was a good product from a failing company - DEC.

• by me551ah on 5/27/20, 5:32 AM

  I am a C# coder and I don't hate or talk about Delphi at all, I didn't even know people still used it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• by pjmlp on 5/27/20, 5:50 AM

  Satire or not, one thing I do fully agree.

  It was a big mistake not embracing AOT from day one, C++ wouldn't have kept its king position in MS ecosystem if the original .NET had been like .NET Native since the begging and kept Delphi like features for low level coding (some of each are have been added since C# 7.x).

  JIT support could still be an additional option as well, just like on languages like Eiffel.

  Instead we got NGEN (with basic optimizations), .NET Native (out of Midori, but which seems on the death march with Project Reunion), MDIL/Bartok (out of Singularity, used only in Windows 8.x), and all remaining efforts are from third parties (Xamarin pre-acquisition), Unity, CosmOS.

  And no one really knows if CoreRT will ever be integrated into the main product.

• by jasonlhy on 5/27/20, 11:56 AM

  I have colleague who still write desktop application in Delphi. I sometimes work with him and to observe how he write Delphi, which is quite impressive, and the performance is remarkable. However, it is really bad at some points.

  First, it is not friendly to web, we have some special web requirements, we decided to spawn a node process to do it.

  Second, the tooling is so much better in Visual Studio. And the compiler is so much smart with sophisticated and syntactic analysis.

  Last but not least, it really lacks 3rd party libraries so people always need to implement themself.

  C# may not be the best option for any application. But it is general enough to almost support every types of application.

• by JamesBarney on 5/27/20, 6:02 AM

  I kept waiting for the tangents to end and the reasons for why Delphi was great would start.

  He never got around to it.

• by bsder on 5/27/20, 6:02 AM

  Except that C# worked on 64-bit OS's practically from the start and Delphi--still only marginally does.

  And this isn't theoretical--Altium actually did a full code rewrite in order to get off of Delphi because of this.

• by mikeabraham on 5/28/20, 6:03 PM

  I miss Delphi. I miss Clipper Summer '87. I miss BeOS. I miss simpler times. Those were good times....

• by locusm on 5/27/20, 7:07 AM

  This brought back fond memories of C++ Builder and the Jedi OSS library.

• by binarycrusader on 5/27/20, 5:33 AM

  Some 3 years after this satire post was published...

  Satire and (2016)

• by ville on 5/27/20, 5:29 AM

  (2016)

• by cttet on 5/27/20, 5:31 AM

  This was published in 2016.

  And the title included "C# coders". I am not a C# coder, but all C# GUI coders I know had praised Delphi for its design and convenience for GUI...

  edit:grammar

• by thePunisher on 5/27/20, 5:58 AM

  This blog is not an article but a rant full of half-truths and outright lies. The author doesn't realize that most C# developers have no knowledge of the history of both Pascal and C (I'm old enough to know) because they were born decades after these languages came into being.

  The author also misses the point that C and C++ are systems programming languages (for developing operating systems, device drivers and low-level stuff such as compilers) and Pascal is an application programming language. C and C++ were pressed into service for developing application programming because many nerds thought it cool to have the fastest benchmark speed test result and ignored the fact that these languages are unsafe to use on a day-to-day basis. That's why C# and Java were invented.