Learning to program in Delphi.

Hobbes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K1VxF13L80

found it on my travels. You can download the software here..

http://www.turboexplorer.com/delphi

Beano

That brings back some memories. I spent 2 years back in the mid 90's programming in Delphi 1.0. Much better than VB3 that was available at the time. Unfortunately the BDE was crap and me lose all faith in borland. Suprised that its still going. Are borland actuallymaking any money from Delphi?

Adam

It looks interesting, but I don't know much about Delphi, is it worth learning these days?

Beano

fade_to_grey wrote:

It looks interesting, but I don't know much about Delphi, is it worth learning these days?

Only if you like programming for fun. I havent seen a job advertised for it in years.

Hobbes

It's OO-Pascal. There is also .NET version out. There are jobs around for it but as Beano mentioned they are pretty rare.

Still a fun language, especially if your starting off.

dazberry

Beano wrote:

Are borland actually making any money from Delphi?

Are borland actually making money would be a better question, they tend to go off in crazy directions and frighten off their loyal customers. The have decided to sell off their tools development and concentrate on Enterprise application lifecycle management blah blah. This is probably a good thing - and hopefully someone/whoever purchases the tools division will give it the attention it truely deserves.

The Turbo move is a great one, and its something they should have done a long time ago. You can actually get working with the latest Delphi version for free - and the only limitation is that you can't add additional components to the components palette (you can still use 3rd party components but not at design time).

The 4 flavours (or personalities) Turbo Delphi, Delphi.Net, C# and C++ are all based on the the professional version of the Borland Developer Studio (BDS 2006) which include all 4 in one. As a result you can only run one on a single PC at any one time.

Only if you like programming for fun. I havent seen a job advertised for it in years.

The Delphi jobs market is limping along - not much going on mind, but there are still a handful of jobs from time to time. The problem is that Delphi seemed to strike it big in a lot of small software companies, and they're most likely places you wouldn't want to work if you were given the choice, that's assuming they're still around.

It a double edged sword however - having interviewed about 30 delphi contractors in the last year - its very difficult to get good people. At that you can also find very experienced delphi people that have spent their life dropping components on forms and scripting the mess together - its heart breaking.

Hobbes wrote:

Still a fun language, especially if your starting off.

An elegant language from a more civilised age .

Seriously thou', it does have an easy learning curve and with the RAD aspect you don't have to dig down until you're ready to, and if/when you want to - you can get there - its not hobbled. The downside is that people form bad habits - and use the RAD to script out from the GUI with little thought about the engineering aspect of software development.

... it still wins hands down if you want to write native Win32 apps btw (without runtimes and dll hell, and frameworks and engines) - but there's the jobs issue.

D.