Dimensional Data

I was chatting with someone who was less familiar with Delphi. He asked what is it about Delphi that makes so many people continue to love it. I thought I would share my answer and see what everyone else thinks. Developer productivity – When Delphi was first introduced it was going head to head with Visual Basic in getting things done fast, and most of the time Delphi was faster for getting things done, and the rest of the time it was still really fast. That continues today. I’ve done presentations for people and they blown away with how fast I can do things with Delphi. Fast native apps – When it comes to app performance Delphi was way faster than VB and is competitive with Visual C++ and any other compiler out there. This is because it builds native apps that run fast. Database access – One of the original goal of Delphi was first class database connectivity. That is something Delphi continues to deliver. BDE was ahead of its time, but FireDAC is a whole new breed. And the great thing is there are so many 3rd party data access libraries to choose from, to give you just the right set of features you need. Platform API access – I remember the first time I needed to access some Windows messages and a Windows API that wasn’t exposed through the RTL. I kind of expected it to be a lot of work. I was pleasantly surprised with how easy and natural it was to add that to my program. I love that Delphi lets you work at the nice high productive level, and then reach down to “touch the metal” and access the APIs. Visual form designers – I’ll admit it, Delphi has spoiled me. I’ve checked out a number of other programming tools, and it is rare to find one that works as good. The ability to design your user interface and preview what it will look like so easily is so useful. Reliable applications – I’ve heard stories about when they demonstrated Delphi’s ability to handle exceptions and people were falling out of their chairs. I don’t know what it is about Delphi, it might just be that the developers who use it are amazing, but I am frequently impressed with how reliable programs are that are developed with Delphi. Good strong community – All the Tech Partners, MVPs, authors, trainers, and developers make the Delphi community amazing. It is always great to see all the amazing projects everyone is working on. So many people willing to help and just be fantastic. It is a great community to be part of. I made this graphic a while ago to explain why developing with Delphi was so awesome. I call it the three levels of development. The idea is each level builds on the one beneath it. The higher levels provide great productivity benefits. The great thing about Delphi is it lets you easily move between these levels. You can do so much in code, even at design time, but it doesn’t keep you at that high level. When you need it you can move down to a lower level, even to the point of writing inline assembly code on Win32. Most other development tools are stuck at just one level, or with just bits and pieces of the other levels. Delphi gives you all […]

LearnDelphi.org provides a platform for Delphi developers and educators, along with free licensing options and ways to get involved January 16, 2020 11:00 AM Eastern Standard Time AUSTIN, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Embarcadero (a division of Idera, Inc.), a provider of cross-platform app development productivity tools, today announced the launch of LearnDelphi.org, a learning ecosystem for Delphi developers, a teaching platform for Delphi educators, and a key destination for all things related to the Delphi Community. “Now Delphi, the best language and IDE for learning to program, has a completely free environment for education” Tweet this LearnDelphi.org is a collection of resources and free content for teaching and learning software development curated by and for Delphi developers. The site includes Delphi licensing options and resources such as ebooks, slideshows, and video tutorials, as well as ways to get involved. The content is compiled and supported by Embarcadero’s MVPs, community members,subject matter experts, and employees, and will be available in multiple languages over time. Potential contributors, educational liaisons, and educators are always welcome and encouraged to get involved. “Now Delphi, the best language and IDE for learning to program, has a completely free environment for education,” said Landerson Gomes dos Santos, logistics, and transport specialist and Embarcadero MVP. “Delphi’s Community Edition includes all the features and facilities for those who want to take the first steps in developing applications for computers and mobile devices. LearnDelphi.org is an exciting initiative for the Delphi community, bringing together resources that students and teachers need to make learning in Delphi more efficient and fun.” Delphi Community Edition offers free professional-grade, non-commercial licenses that are ideal for students’ home projects or early-stage start-ups (see FAQs). Academic Edition is another free option that offers a group-oriented classroom licensing package that is ideal for high schools and universities that meet certain qualifications. “Delphi’s Object Pascal is the best programming language for anyone wanting to learn to program, and the Delphi Community Edition from Embarcadero is a great place to start building apps for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. It lets you quickly and easily build apps for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS,” said Jim McKeeth, chief developer advocate at Embarcadero. “LearnDelphi.org is an intuitive compilation of resources that students and teachers need for learning to program with Delphi.” Delphi expanded significantly in the context of RAD Studio, which pioneered rapid visual object-oriented programming. Over the years, Pascal and Delphi became a staple for computer education and continue to be standard in many countries where many students learn to program with it. Today’s Delphi has rich support for Objects, Anonymous methods, Generics, Multi-Threading, and a robust type system. With free libraries, it is easy to expand Delphi with Duck Typing, Domain-Specific, Functional Logic, Neural Networking, and more. No other programming language provides such diverse programming paradigms with a simple language, native compilation, and rich IDE and tooling. “Since the availability of the Starter Edition, and later with Community Edition, Delphi has been freely offered as a supported language on learning sites, such as Exercism.io,” said Ryan Potts, software developer at Gateway Ticketing Systems and Embarcadero MVP. “It is great to see Delphi regaining the momentum and popularity it truly deserves.” Visit LearnDelphi.org to find learning resources or to get involved. About Embarcadero Embarcadero builds tools that solve productivity problems for application developers. The company’s products allow users to design, build and run […]

One of Embarcadero’s MVPs, Ryan Potts, is the originator and maintainer of the Delphi track on Exercism – a site dedicated to making it easy for people to learn different programming languages. He was interviewed by the Exercism team previously, but I thought it would be interesting to interview him about what Exercism is, and how all of you can be involved. What is Exercism? How long has it been around, and how many students visit it? A not-for-profit organization providing opportunity through programming education The Delphi track had 3 new solutions submitted, 1 for mentoring. See their about page for more It was originally founded in 2013 by Katrina Owen. Each week I receive a mentoring update.  The most recent update indicates that during the last week of 2019 2,152 people submitted 8,107 solutions across all the language tracks.  Of those 2,339 were submitted for mentoring. 174 mentors gave feedback on 1,963 solutions. What sort of programming languages are found on Exercism? There are 51, including our favorite, Delphi! What kind of exercises might someone find on Exercism? Do any of the exercises involve building Graphical User Interfaces or accessing databases? What about accessing REST APIs? These are things that Delphi makes so much easier. Or are they all console applications? At the moment all the exercises are console only.  I have considered creating some Delphi specific exercises to utilize Delphi’s ability to pretty easily build GUIs, just haven’t had the time myself.  This would be a great way other experienced Delphi developers to help.  Does a student need any experience to start? No, but knowledge of the command line is essential. Does it cost anything? What sort of tools does a student need to get started?  Each language track has set up instructions to let you know what you need and where to find it. For example with Delphi you need to install Delphi. There is also a command-line tool that all the tracks use. If a student is completely new to Delphi what do they need to do to get started. Once someone has signed up for the Delphi track they will find instructions on how to set up their system.  (They are a bit dated, a few versions of Delphi have been released since I wrote these.) Other links are also available from the same location for more Delphi related resources. Is it true the Exercism Windows CLI installer is written in Delphi? Exercism’s Windows CLI Installer is open source and written entirely in Delphi. It automatically determines the correct version (32/64 bit) of the Exercism CLI the student needs then downloads the CLI, extracts it, and puts it in the right place. The installer has been downloaded 15,000 times, which I’m pretty proud of!  Is Exercism only for new developers or are there things experienced developers might learn there as well? It is not only for new developers, but is probably geared towards someone with only a little experience, knowledge of how to operate a terminal (command prompt) interface is essential.  How is Exercism similar to a code kata?  It essentially IS a repository of code katas; with added benefit of having someone knowledgeable in the language you are working in review and critique your work. The term code kata is a concept first used by Dave Thomas, co-author of the book […]

Early on I learned Turbo Pascal, which was a huge step up from the Basic and Batch File programming I cut my teeth on. When Delphi came along I thought it was brilliant and fell in love immediately. I had no interest in learning other programming languages or tools. Delphi did it all, and that was great. I found myself plenty of work and enough to keep my interest. I was curious about other programming languages, from an academic point of view. I took a night school class in Assembly. I had a smattering of C & C++. Looked at some Ruby (back before it was hip), Java, JavaScript, etc. Eventually, I found myself spending a few years debugging laser printers, which ran a combination of C/C++/COM all on a Linux platform. From there I went back to full-time Delphi programming, but the new company I was working for bought into the “there aren’t enough Delphi developers” myth and decided to move to C# & WinForms. We immediately were able to hire some new C# developers, but as we got to know them we found out they had more Delphi experience than C#, but they bought into the “there are no Delphi jobs” myth and re-branded themselves as C# developers. (This is what we call a circular argument or self-fulfilling prophecy.) In the end, the project took 4 times longer than it should have, despite having more developers, and “more modern developer tools.” They really should have stuck with Delphi. I moved to a new job doing Delphi development full time, and then that company bought into the C# & Silverlight are the future. Since I had C# experience, I started working on the new Silverlight front end. The back end and the desktop app remained in Delphi (with a little C++). We all know what happened with Silverlight (if you even remember it . . .) From there I ended up really branching out. I did a lot more work with C#, Xamarin, Java, JavaScript, Objective-C, and Oxygene (known as Delphi Prism at the time). There was still some Delphi mixed in too. I taught a few classes and workshops on Android development with Java. I learned to appreciate some of the benefits, strengths, and qualities of each. I found things about all of them I liked (less so about Objective-C). It was at this point I could see that most developer skills work across languages, tools, and platform. There is value in knowing and using multiple languages. The basic tenants of each language influence the way you do things in other languages, in a positive way, helping you to look at problems in a different way. There are some projects, platforms, and problems that are best suited to certain programming languages and tools. For example, if you are working with the web, you need to know at least some JavaScript, HTML & CSS (the latter two not being programming languages, but I digress), even if you are using some sort of abstraction layer. Throughout all of this, I still found myself choosing to Delphi for personal projects. Occasionally I’d try personal projects in other tools and languages as a way to get to know them better, but I still found Delphi to be a better solution for most general purpose projects. […]

Back in 2018 U.S. News an World Report ranked Software Developer as the best job for 2018, pushing out Dentist, and it is still ranks the top job in 2020. They use data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics to rank jobs based on pay, job security, mental engagement, stress, room to advance, satisfaction, and work-life balance. Since you are here, you most likely agree with that ranking and are surprised it took so long for someone else to recognize it. This means we will see a lot of people interesting in software development. Anyone looking for a better job is likely to start at the top of that list and work their way down until they find one they are interested in. Not to mention everyone who sees the headlines about Software Developer replacing Dentist as the #1 Best Job. Whatever the reason, software developers will get a lot more attention. When I’m talking to people about career advice I think it is more important to choose a career that suits the individual (internal factors) than basing the decision purely on external factors like pay, etc. That being said, I honestly believe Software Development is only going to get more important. Going forward, software development and related jobs (many of which aren’t even invented yet) will consume the many of the other jobs as automation and artificial intelligence take over more aspects of our life. It all depends on which side of the automation revolution you want to be. When I was really young (like 3rd grade) I knew I wanted to program computers for a living. A family friend told me that I should look for a different job because by the time I entered the career market computers would be programming themselves and there would be no jobs. I remember thinking once that happens there would be no jobs, and someone would need to teach the computers how to program themselves better. Just recently I was in Tokyo for the 10.2 launch event. I was talking to members of the press, and one of them made a similar assertion “What is the point of releasing better developer tools when soon computers will be programming themselves?” I shared the story from when I was a kid and said that “Yes, AI is automating and consuming other jobs, but the programmer will be the last to go. Once AI’s no longer need humans to make them better there will be no jobs for anyone!” So what does this mean for you, as a software developer today? Congratulation’s you choose wisely! But be prepared for a lot of people to come to you for career advice.

If you aren’t familiar with the Law of the Instrument, otherwise known as Maslow’s hammer/gavel, or the golden hammer it is often expressed as If your only tool is a hammer, you treat everything like a nail. My understanding is that the law of the instrument means you are limited by instruments or tools you know how to use. For example, if you have a screw, some wood, and a hammer, then you might successfully get the screw into the wood, but a screwdriver would be a better alternative. The law of the instrument also means an obsession with the perfection of the instruments you know. I remember back in the day when I was convinced there was no reason to bother with any other programming languages because Delphi was the best. Now I’ve spent some time using a lot of other programming languages, and so I can confidently say Delphi is the best, while I can also see the value and use of other programming languages. I believe it is worthwhile learning about new technologies, frameworks, languages, or methodologies. Then you can pick the correct one for the job. This doesn’t mean you need to be an expert in all of them, but you should know enough that you are confident in your choice. The reverse of this is the obsession to chase new and exciting technologies and recreate things every few years. This keeps the developers entertained, but doesn’t really provide business value. Again I believe Delphi does a good job with this as it respects your existing code while moving forward to new platforms, features, and frameworks. So what is the Curse of the Programmer? When I’m talking to other programmers I see two behaviors. The first is, every problem they encounter in life (at work and beyond) they respond with “I could write a program to do this,” or some variation. By extension, they also cast a critical eye toward any software system (even those developed by themselves) to see how to do them better. This results in a huge backlog of projects that they create to fix problems, fix a problem better, or just out of curiosity to see if they can. This is similar to the Law of the Instrument, but I see it more as your learning the flexibility and power of programming results in your seeing many opportunities to apply it. I’ve talked to people in other industries, and I think the general tendency is fairly universal, it is just that programming is (in my opinion) so much more powerful and flexible than many other applied technologies. The second behavior, which is something to be more cautious about falling into, is the urge to create a “library” or “framework” instead of finishing the program at hand. For example, you are creating a program to solve a problem, and in the process, you create series of libraries just in case you need to solve similar problems. There is value in having reusable libraries, functions, components, and frameworks. The trick is to not let the creation of them get in the way of shipping. The best way I’ve found to deal with this is to only create the library when you need it. Write your code with the appropriate level of coupling to solve the problem at hand. When you need to […]