Re:They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pas...
by switchbak on Saturday November 07, 2026 @04:57PM
(#50408426)
I was using Delphi in a shop that did mixed C/C++, VB and Delphi. You'd basically rank the people based on the tool - the wizards using C++ (segfaulting all the way), boot camp folks using VB for testing and mockups, and Delphi was this weird thing also used by testers.
So here's me this Linux guy coming to a Windows shop that came from C/C++ and Turbo Pascal, loving Delphi - and I broke their brain. Naturally instead of investigating if the tool is good, they just write off the person using it. Nothing to see here!
It's one of those things that was ahead of its time (think Smalltalk / Lisp, etc). C++ obviously had (and kind of still has) its place, but Delphi could do 80% or more of that, and in radically less time, code, compile time, etc.
Re:They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pas...
by LorenPechtel on Sunday November 08, 2026 @11:44AM
(#50414804)
Delphi suffered from a lack of keeping up.
They kept jacking up the price but were many years behind on 64-bit. That said to me they were looking to extract cash, not support developers. And C# was just about as good but properly supported. And in time Microsoft closed most of the gaps.
A cool thing about TP was that it had simple and convenient support for inline assembly, which was the gateway drug for me learning more low level programming.
It’s really sad that Delphi didn’t take off like VB. It was a superior environment in every way. Faster programs, better UI, much better language, and I would argue easier to use (in VB you spent a lot of time working around the limitations of BASIC in my experience). Hard to compete with Microsoft though.
I didn’t realise at the time that, with the advent of web apps (and my interest in them), that chapter of my life would be the last time I would work with such a clean, integrated dev environment.