Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

Re:Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million ... by pjc50 on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @07:44AM (#22117017)

Speaking as someone who learned in the Turbo Pascal / Turbo C era, StackOverflow has moved the state of the art on hugely, and people's dependency on it is more a symptom of the environements they are working in than anything else.

> Progress is neither linear, increasing nor assured, and much is lost, reinvented not necessarily as well and lost again.

The big difference is that we are now networked. The target MSDOS environment was not a moving target and had no security considerations. The world is very different now; we do so much programming in the browser because it's the one single cross-platform zero-friction environment we have. But those reasons also make it a battleground between platform monopolists.

There is also so much more software. Part of the problem that Stackoverflow solves is dealing with this. You can't be an expert on everything, there isn't enough time and it moves too fast. So you need a quick solution to incidental problems so you can get back to the "core" problem.

(credentials: the code I wrote at age sixteen for doing 3D rendering https://github.com/pjc50/ancient-3d-for-turboc )

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Re:Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million ... by cr0sh on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @12:09PM (#22119482)

Interesting code and fairly readable; I liked the simple scripting system, and there were a few comments and examples, and yes - double buffering of the Mode 13h screen (though the memory allocation seemed weird, but maybe there was a good reason for that). Certainly better written code than what I was writing at 16, mainly in BASIC and assembler at the time (was a fan of the Lee Adams series of 3D programming books).

Affordable C compilers (for a teenager at least) were not really a thing at the time (IIRC, even the DOS stuff, if you owned such a machine which I did not, still cost a couple hundred dollars around 1989-90-ish). I didn't manage to get a C compiler until the mid-90s when I picked up a copy of Turbo C for DOS, but I still think I paid $100 for the privilege.

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Re:Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million ... by bitwize on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @12:37PM (#22119866)

> browser

> zero-friction environment

Giggle.

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Re:Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million ... by pjc50 on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @04:17PM (#22122147)

If you know another way I can deploy code instantly on everything from PCs to phones to televisions without even having to sign anything, pay anything, or get approval, I'm all ears.

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