Almost the exact same experience: started at 14 and now close to 30.
Back in the day, we used to exchange game CDs in my small town, and by a mistake I got one with Delphi 5. I knew nothing about programming, just installed it, clicked around, somehow managed to run the default app, and got an empty window. We didn't have internet, so I had to ask around what this thing was about, someone said all other programs were done with it. There were no books about Delphi in local bookshops, the closest I found was an introductory book about Visual Basic. Armed with a book on VB and Delphi 3, by trial and error I had managed to produce my first ever working apps.
Few months later I was a well-known "programmer" in my town and wrote my first production ready app: a management system for a taxi company that managed exactly 20 cars. Why twenty? Because I haven't figured out loops and all my loops over those 20 cars were "unrolled" - 20 consecutive lines of if/else statements! But it worked! I don't know for how long, but it was still in use when I moved from the town few years later.
LOL!!!!
> 20 consecutive lines
Haha that's nice think about trial and error.
Cool history!
I would like more people to experience what was the way of creating software with Delphi, seamless and easy, really closing the loop between creating and the resulting application and then look back at what unnecessary complexity we are dealing with every day when working with software. (nb I think there was a blog somewhere by one of Delphi's creators where they explicitly mentioned that the language and IDE were designed to be simple to use).
If I will be teaching programming to my children I will dig up old installation of Delphi 7 and just let them play.
Might be nostalgia speaking, but even if it doesn't lag behind, I'm pretty sure it hasn't gotten better. I guess QT Creator actually comes close.
(Plus: Compile times were never ever an issue...)
Now for the web, nevermind.
Java has Netbeans Matisse for Swing, Eclipse WindowsBuilder for Swing and SWT, Scene Builder for JavaFX, Android Studio designer. Not sure what InteliJ offers.
Objective-C and Swift have the XCode GUI design tools, based on the NeXTStep development environment.
C++ has UI designers for Qt/QML, C++ Builder, UWP/XAML.
Object Pascal has Delphi and Lazarus.
Xojo as Visual Basic dialect also has its own designer.
Commercial Common Lisp environments like Alegro CL and LispWorks also have their designers in the tradition of Lisp Machines.
Smalltalk environments also have GUI designers.
These are just some examples that come to my mind.
I often think nostalgically back to my NT4 system. A full office suite, photoshop, and delphi IDE running side by side in 128 MB of RAM, with room to spare, and very zippy. I see some functional improvements in modern day software, but nothing that warrants the incredible bloat.
I notice that the software industry as a whole still lives in the assumption that hardware can fix slow software. However, that doesn't seem to be the case. If you look at single-threaded performance the improvements are much less than they used to be. We may reach a point where CPUs stop getting faster at all. At what point should we go back to micro-optimizing our code?
I also start with Pascal (Turbo 3, 4, 5, 5.5 (greatest!), 6 and little bit 7). Then jump to Delphi (all 1-7) and then abandon it.
Much kudos must go to Anders Hejlsberg, who wrote the compiler in assembly language, starting on it at age 20[1]. Hejlsberg went on to create Delphi, J++, C#, and TypeScript.
I still regard TP 1.0 as one of the best software products I've used, and feel it is a testament to brilliant, performant, compact software development - and to its developer.
How many years later and the web still does not catch up.
1) JS isn't discoverable from the perspective of the IDE. There's no static typing and no way for the IDE to hook up code to UI elements, and vice-versa. You need a statically-typed language that can transpile to JS without too much "impedance mismatch".
2) HTML layout functionality isn't really geared for the type of layouts that are present in desktop applications. Document-oriented layouts have a completely different set of requirements.
3) You have to solve the design-time/run-time issue, and this is not an easy issue to solve due to 1). You can't just use a browser engine at design-time for the WYSIWYG portion, so you need to create a whole "browser emulation" layer in the IDE, along with an execution environment for your statically-typed language.
Our product, Elevate Web Builder, solves these issues and implements a Delphi-like IDE for developing single-page web applications:
https://www.elevatesoft.com/products?category=ewb&type=web
We've got a new version coming out soon that will also offer server-side coding in Object Pascal, giving developers a single-source-language approach to developing complex web applications.
Re: patterned functions: you can't rely on patterned functions in a full-featured IDE that allows any class method to be an event handler/delegate for another class instance. What you end up may look like what Delphi is doing, but it is just an approximation of the real thing that won't work very well for general-purpose usage. There's going to be all sorts of edge cases that don't work correctly because you can't get a reliable signature for a given method.
Previously, systems like Squeak used a pattern where objects had a collection of "dependents" that would be updated when sent the `changed` message. I think this is still how input events -- keys, mouse, etc -- work in Morphic.
In either case, the "handler" is whatever you want it to be, so long as the target object implements the appropriate message.
As for discoverable, I'd say most things in a Smalltalk are easily discoverable, though some of the patterns can get convoluted if you're inheriting an ancient object structure.
By "discoverable", I mean can the IDE:
1) Compile/analyze the code in the component library/run-time,
2) Figure out which type of method can be used for a certain type of event property for a given class, and
3) Display all matching methods in the current unit/module for the user to select.
This is what Delphi does (and Visual Studio with WinForms), and all of it is done at design-time, meaning that your application is not getting compiled in order to determine any of this.
From what you're describing, I don't think Smalltalk is doing the same thing. However, it could be doing something similar if it enforces (at design-time) this part:
"so long as the target object implements the appropriate message"
It's easier to think of a Smalltalk image as a live system that you are configuring (using Smalltalk itself) for some end-user or goal. Because a Smalltalk image is simply a snapshot of the state of the whole system, you can use a development image to generate a more bare-bones, customer image/application if you so choose. In other words, you can configure a Smalltalk image however you want for a client. This would be the equivalent of the kind of "compiling" that creates a usable end product. You are manipulating a live system and configuring it for some purpose rather than describing a system in text files, compiling it, and then giving it to people to use.
On a technical level, you are compiling all of the time when working in a Smalltalk. Every time you save, the changes recompile and execute, live, as instantly as these things can.
Of course this means that Smalltalk is highly self-aware, and therefore there can be / are some of the IDE features you've listed. One of my favorites is the ability to provide example inputs and example outputs and see recommended objects/messages and implement the method for doing it. It probably exists in other Java IDEs or something, but I've never seen it elsewhere myself.
I will definitely try Pharo and see how it all works. I've read a bit here and there about Smalltalk over the years, and the whole environment seems really cool. I'm especially interested in the whole "not requiring static types", because that may give some ideas on how to do a JS IDE without losing the functionality that we wish to maintain. The "liveness" of the Smalltalk environment is also very much in line with how JS/HTML are used, so there may be a natural fit there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11834887
That is the top comment by him in that sub-thread. My question to him is 2nd reply below, then he replied at even greater length. Some pretty deep stuff..
(In another of his comments - this one, in a different thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14677396 - he also mentioned that Lisp and Smalltalk are two of only a few languages that share some of the features he talks about.)
I recommend getting the Adele Goldberg "Smalltalk: The Language and its Implementation" (colloquially known as the "Blue Book"). I find it to be the second best programming book ever, aside from The Little Schemer.
So I guess another way of saying it is that older desktop based technologies like WinForms are more geared towards purely functional experiences. The web can go above and beyond providing merely functional experiences. The aesthetic and the experience as a whole is important.
>older desktop based technologies like WinForms are more geared towards purely functional experiences. The web can go above and beyond providing merely functional experiences.
Not talking about web sites here, but web apps, which in the modern sense are much more aligned with desktop apps than websites of old.
Regardless, there's nothing that precludes you from wrapping any control you desire into an interface that makes it droppable and configurable through a GUI editor, then have it generate code. Likewise, for the creation of different layout managers, though in practice I don't think you'd find a ton of variability there. Most "experiences" boil down to grid-based and responsive.
So, I'm not sure which precise experiences you imagine couldn't be created. It's all just code. But, if there are some, then they'd be the exception, not the rule.
You can already create simple websites with tools like above. But non-trivial SPA's can't usually be constrained by tools like that because they don't allow for enough flexibility.
It's not that the web hasn't caught up to GUI editor paradigm that has been around for decades. In fact WYSWYG web editors were common when the web was in its infancy.
Yeah, you've kind of repeated variations of that vague statement, to which I've replied with specific capabilities/features that SPAs and modern webapps tend to use. I've suggested that they represent very common features/layouts that can readily be constructed with the aid of a GUI tool.
But, here, you've now responded with a few website builders that are not intended to be used for the kinds of SPAs/modern webapps we're discussing. That doesn't make a point, except to say that "other things exist".
Do you have specific examples of SPA/webapp functionality that cannot be readily built with the aid of a GUI tool?
Controls in desktop apps are not just "cookie-cutter" (if I understand correctly what you mean by that). They can be subclassed in C / C++ / Delphi etc. code, to add to, or override, the functionality as well as the appearance of the superclass control. (And individual desktop app developers can, did, and still do this. It is not necessary to buy or downloads such custom controls, anyone can write them - like you say for the web.) This was being done way back in Windows (from as early as Windows 3.x [1]) and probably in Unix too (X-Windows). In fact, X-Windows may be the source, or one of the early examples, of the famous saying "provide mechanism, not policy" [2], which is related to this topic. (What that saying implies is that policy - which often involved look-and-feel - could be, and was, provided by higher layers, than the lowest layer, Xlib, which provided the mechanism (for X's style of client-server GUI programming.) I've not checked their implementation details, but probably both GNOME and KDE (which both look and behave rather differently from each other, though both are fundamentally Unix desktop environments), are built on top of X-Windows (in its newer avatar of XFree86 or whatever it is called these days).
[1] I just did this Google search for the term "paul dilascia windows programming book", and the first search result is:
http://www.amazon.in/Windows-Writing-Reusable-Schulman-Progr...
which is a book by him called "Windows ++: Writing Reusable Windows Code in C++ (The Andrew Schulman Programming Series)" - which was considered an influential book at the time (see Wikipedia page link below). I had read it, years ago, out of interest, even though I was not doing much GUI programming at the time. It showed (with code) how to use C++ to wrap the procedural (WndProc), event-driven Win 32 GUI API in C++ classes, not only for more reusable code (as the book title says), but also how to subclass existing Windows controls and add more functionality to them, or change their appearance, etc. In fact, IIRC, his Windows++ framework completely hid (from the developer) the traditional, error-prone, manually coded WndProc window procedure style of programming, that was the staple of raw Win32 GUI programming. I was quite junior as a programmer at the time when I read the book, but remember thinking even then, that it was something significant that he was writing about, and the book helped me to understand some of those deeper topics to some extent. To describe it another way, the book basically contained the full C++ code for something like a smaller version of MS's MFC or Borland's Delphi or other OO Windows GUI frameworks that wrapped the lower-level raw Win32 GUI API, which involved writing a lot of low-level procedural boilerplate code (with a hand-coded event loop for each app you wrote). That was some general background and history, but more relevant to your point, it shows that customizing controls is very much possible and done in desktop apps too (not just in web apps). And you do not need to write your own GUI framework in order to customize controls, either. You can just take classes from an existing GUI framework that you use, and subclass those classes, and add or override functionality, including both look-and-feel and behavior. The second search result is Paul Dilascia's Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dilascia .
[2]:
http://wiki.c2.com/?PolicyAndMechanism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System_protocols_and_...
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb7...
(above page's subtitle: "Creating Owner-Drawn Controls")
Using Visual Styles with Custom and Owner-Drawn Controls:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd3...
But I've never seen any layout render engine with the same feature set as modern HTML/CSS engines.
HTML has more features about layout. Also styling is more flexible in HTML.
XAML has better rendering (esp. in WPF), better alpha blending (esp. in UWP), much better animations, better vector graphics, and better editor (you can create acceptable layouts using WYSIWYG, not touching raw markup). Also it has templating, data binding, and other features not found in HTML.
Other technologies cited are very limited, not even close to what current web technologies offer.
Because until recently even basic stuff like centering text or grid layouts were an exercise in frustration.
Not to mention the magical incantation dance with CSS transforms to try to force a browser to use hardware acceleration.
Or nonsense like Shadom DOM to be able to define some sort of components, which are only properly supported on Chrome.
UWP isn't a failed experiment by most measures, and you may not directly notice the API transition in many major Windows components from Win32 to UWP, but it's happening.
For what it is worth, the RAD experience for UWP is pretty good and if you want to make a not-very-well-architected "VB6-ish code behind" app with Visual Studio RAD tools, you can knock it out in about the time it would have taken you in VB6.
There are already people playing with prototyping language runtimes into it.
It is a project that I've built 8 years ago. Delphi was already a "strange think" on that time, it was declining fast. I think Java killed Delphi - "One codebase for all platforms, even your freezer will have Java!" - this was the cool sentence on that time.
Since I started with Delphi when I was 14 (I am now 33), a lot of thinks changed to me. Now I mainly work in back-end field, building APIs, Bots, Crawlers and Queues to do massive things (like receive million SMS per hour in a voting system for a TV Reality Show program)
When I am programming, 70% of my time is Nodejs, 10% Python and 20% Vuejs.
But I still miss the old days of drag-N-drop GUI of Delphi, really easy.