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Delphi / OOP
Not sure this is the right category. Any Delphi programmers in? I’m a long-time hobbyist with Delphi 7, have developed apps, DLLs, components, libraries and so on but am at a really amateur level: no knowledge of client-server apps especially internet.
Any quick easy tips, links to good guides and so on?
Alternatively anyone need any tiny apps for Windows PCs? I’d be happy to write something for someone for free if it’s small and easy.
Hi Greg, welcome. I have been a professional programmer for about 9 years now, however my experience has never introduced me to Delphi. I primarily work in .NET and javascript. How did you get introduced to programming and Delphi? I respect people who dabble in programming as a hobby. I have a theory that computer programming helps lead people towards the path of liberty as well, as it teaches objective analysis of complex problems.
Hi Christopher! I’m one hundred percent certain you’re right!
Making an app based on an idea out in the world is a matter of defining the problem in precise detail and turning it into a step-by-step procedure. If that doesn’t make us see facts about the world that are usually hidden, nothing will. I’m totally certain programming (and all formal modes of thought really) tends to lead people toward liberty.
I got into Delphi when they gave away Delphi 2 on the cover of a magazine. I’d always been intimidated by ‘modern’ programming, having been a fairly hardcore Sinclair BASIC writer in the 80s… I just couldn’t see how I could begin to deal with mice and windows and so on, and all the MS-DOS programming environments were beyond ridiculous: QBasic was inferior to Sinclair BASIC (albeit quicker) and GNU-C (DJGPP or whatever) was much too low level for my taste, at least in terms of getting anything useful done.
Delphi was a revelation. Of course I understand why something based on Pascal would be a big joke really: quite amazed anyone used it in the professions at all. But it’s fun, and by Delphi 7 we had operator overriding, multiple inheritance and all manner of fancy virtual/abstract bullshit going on.
The only experience I have with .NET was adding ini-file functionality to a hack for Gunz Online since it was just too annoying to have to recompile it every time they had maintenance lol…….. the very notion of ‘DLL injection’ really shook my faith in Windows, I can tell you!! Fun days though…….. 100% accurate shooting (with manual aim of course, just no gun errors). Wasn’t my hack, just my extension of it to allow easier updates.
What kind of stuff do you find most enjoyable and/or most liberty-oriented?
Oh Delphi is a delightful product. It successfully worked around the limitations of Pascal, while keeping the everything reasonably elegant.
I used Delphi very successfully for a while – but I’m now Microsoft-free and Delphi is a Windows-only product.
Thanks for the reply Roger! What’s Macintosh like to write for?
(I think there is a Linux Delphi – can’t remember the name but it’s Borland-developed. I’m years out of date though so could be flat out wrong.)
I do my programming on Linux nowadays, Greg. I think there was maybe a Linux Delphi at some time, but I recall it was deficient in some way. You can run Delphi on Linux with the Wine library, but it kind of defeats the purpose because you can’t use it to develop native Linux applications.
Is Linux fun to write on? Never tried it but been curious, like most people. Is it less bureaucratic than Windows, with all the million layers of nonsense?
Linux is a very diverse platform, with a wide range of libraries and APIs. So, for example, there’s no standard GUI toolkit. You can do Linux as simple or as complicated as you want.
I would say, though, that unless you are doing low-level projects like writing device drivers, developing for Linux is not that different to developing for Windows.
The culture, on the other hand, is very different. Most Linux apps are open source, whereas Windows still has many closed apps.
That’s a very good point!
I think sometimes that coding, more than any other human activity, has necessitated the demise of ‘intellectual property’.
It’s quite breath-taking hubris really for any person to claim absolute authorship of an app written using Windows APIs up to and including DirectX, Winsock and so on. How can they imagine they made it from whole cloth when they’re forced to personally and manually interface with so many quite obviously ‘existing’ technologies!
I mean if you had a computer with nothing but a basic I/O system and ANSI-C installed, no matter how great a programmer you were, you’d be back to the 1970s.
Programming is the ultimate boot-strapping, piggy-backing environment: knowledge built on knowledge built on knowledge.
I’m going to make a point of learning some Linux. Thanks for the spur to action!
