Joseph MItzen

I've got some recommendations.

Hey, you deal with the Delphi IDE long enough, you need a fistful of cheap unmarked pills of dubious provenance to get through the day!

You're reminding me of something written by Dennis Ritchie about operator precedence in C. At one point early on they wanted to change it, but Ritchie said "We can't; there's almost a million lines of C code out there!" He wrote that in retrospect they should have made the change. Contrast this with the creator of Python, Guido Van Rossum, when talking about breaking compatibility to change how Unicode strings were handled. I don't have the exact quote, but it went something like "All the lines of Python ever written pale in comparison to the number of lines of Python yet to be written". This gets into the touchy subject of how many people are writing new code in Delphi versus how many are maintaining legacy code. Even with C++Builder they brought the 32bit compiler up to C++17 first, saying you'd be surprised how much 32bit code is being maintained by C++Builder users.

Maybe the word you're looking for is "template"?

DBeaver is one of the premier open source/commercial database management tools.... https://github.com/dbeaver/dbeaver You might also want to look into the online dummy data generators, such as.... http://filldb.info/

They don't make their own compilers anymore, do they?

Embarcadero sold to Idera for $600 million. Idera was said to be about the same size as Embarcadero at the time of acquisition, putting the worth of the combined entity at approximately $1.2 billion dollars. For perspective, Embarcadero bought CodeGear for $30 million. As Jolyon Duranko-Smith once observed, if we're extremely generous and assume that the worth of Delphi doubled under its time with Embarcadero, that puts its contribution to the worth of Idera at 5%. It's not a particularly important asset for them.

There's no "perhaps" about it. On the RemObjects forum a comment came up about perhaps RemObjects would buy Delphi if it was up for sale (this may have been around the time it became clear Idera was going to buy Embarcadero). Marc Hoffman then replied, asking what made the poster think they'd even want it. He went on to say that he wouldn't want anything to do with Embarcadero after his experiences with them. He also revealed that at one point during their discussions someone from Embarcadero said "We own Pascal".

Don't worry; they don't have any more of those either so you're at least on equal footing.

"We can't afford a faster computer because Delphi is so expensive".😞

They never fixed that?!?!?!?

Hmmm.... maybe you're both right! I think we need to be discussing other languages here because I can't recall a mainstream language with a "with" statement that does what Delphi's does (Python has a "with" keyword but for a different purpose). So perhaps the question should be asked... how do other languages address this problem? Joe Gregorio of Google once gave a talk in which he stated that design patterns were "language smell". He stated that when the same code is written over and over that's where a feature is needed. He talked about the lack of design patterns in Python and other languages like LISP and then went through how features like first class functions in those languages removed the need for the classic design patterns. Perhaps Delphi's "with" points to language smell and we can look at what features languages without that smell have that eliminate it. Why are people using with? To avoid writing code like this: someBigThing.x := 7; someBigThing.y := 8; someBigThing.z := 9; No one wants to write "someBigThing" over and over. We also see code in Delphi where an object is initialized, then lots of parameters are set one by one (creating a temptation to use "with") and then finally an "execute" method or similar is called. I once dubbed this "the Delphi pattern" and then discovered that it's also a problem/pattern in Java and they have a name for it. Unfortunately, I can't recall it right now. 😞 But how is this dealt with in languages other than Delphi and Java? It turns out there is a language feature which eliminates this pattern.... named parameters. The code above can become No ambiguity of the with statement, yet no redundancy of omitting it either! The "Delphi pattern" for object initialization can disappear too into one line of code. If Delphi introduced named arguments the with statement could be eliminated, removing the dangers, while at the same time preserving the benefits and brevity it granted. A simple fix that makes everyone happy and incidentally provides one of the modern language features needed to design some beautiful APIs. The funny thing is that the language actually does have named parameters, but only under very specific circumstances.... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/885942/named-optional-parameters-in-delphi Trivia note: The above is the only Delphi-related Stack Overflow question without a reply from David Heffernan.

Well, maybe we should listen to what all those people have to say too. I'm sure there is a lot to learn from many different languages.

Nobody bring this up with Rudy. I watched him argue voraciously in the distant past that namespace collision with imported units was a feature of the language and there shouldn't even be a warning because it's a feature. He couldn't recall who called it a feature or why, but that didn't shake his conviction in the least. 😭

In that case, you want to check out goop.