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Joseph MItzen

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Everything posted by Joseph MItzen

  1. Is this ever going to introduce a human-perceivable performance increase? Basically everything has a single string type nowadays. Again, I can't conceive of human-perceptible results by fiddling with different string types, but it does slow down human coding and make the language more difficult to learn. It's also more code for Embarcadero to maintain. And as the saying goes, "Every line of code that doesn't need to be written is a line of code guaranteed to be bug-free." I don't think "We have less string types!" is really a winning marketing slogan. Although they did completely run out of ideas for promoting Interbase and came up with the below ad.... Fair enough; I prefer the "break everything at random" approach to keep people on their toes, constantly refactoring and adopting language changes.
  2. Joseph MItzen

    Missing The Old Forums

    I won't go into the whole story, but I once had an online exchange with David Intersimone, then VP of Developer Relations, about a survey he'd run and tried to explain to him how it was only going to tell him what he wanted to hear and not what he needed to know. Despite my being a professional data analyst at the time, it felt like he was trying to lecture me on how surveys worked. I tried to explain that when you survey the first 500 people to buy a new release, you're missing those who chose not to upgrade because of bugs, price or features, which were the three biggest complaints at the time (still are). Of course, it also missed those who had already opted to leave for another platform. That's when David gave me insight into the thought processes at Embarcadero and I knew there was no helping them... he wrote "People leave Delphi for C#; people leave C# for Delphi; so we just keep on doing what we're doing." In short, they're like a black box whose outputs are not influenced by the inputs. This survey asked questions like (approximately) "What's the most awesome thing you can think of about Delphi?" and nothing about what's your biggest problem with it. Answers to this question (from the biggest fans who were quickest to order the upgrade) were used within days by the marketing team in a press release and a blog entry, showing the survey was nothing more than quote mining for marketing. Marco Cantu tried to claim that they have lots of surveys - dozens, hundreds, thousands! - where they ask all the questions I suggested and more, although no one seems to have ever received an invitation to take one of these alleged surveys. In another instance a person talked about being a subject domain expert but no Delphi experience who was hired by a Delphi shop. They took him to... he called it a user group meeting, but it sounded like one of the old World Tour events. I'll skip over his general impressions, but he was unsettled by the small number and age of the participants. He brought this up after the meeting with the Embarcadero employee who was there and said that the employee responded to him: "We don't like for new people to show up at these meetings; they're filled with angry middle-aged white men". I've got a few more examples I won't go into, but I'll say I've seen and heard enough to be convinced that for the *majority* of Embarcadero employees, the concerns of customers aren't really high on their agenda (David Millington being a notable exception). When two of the people who actually develop Delphi showed up in the old forums one day and someone brought up a critical bug they were experiencing and not getting help with, one of them wrote: "See - this is why we don't like to come here." Tony de la Llama, who was in sales, showed up in the forums once and he was a nice, friendly guy. When someone told him about a problem they were having, he expressed personal sorrow over their experience and promised to escalate the issue personally so they'd get a fix. He said we were all swell people and he really enjoyed interacting with the users and planned on doing it again. Days later the EMBT CEO blamed Tony personally for low Delphi sales (I was told this by another EMBT employee) and fired him right before Christmas. 😞 So anyway, they did not have a history of listening to their customers, rarely showed up in the forum and when they did it often didn't go well. And the one person who really listened got fired. Hence I don't think it's that great a loss. (Again, I want to give David Millington credit for being one of the few EMBT employees to visit forums, including Reddit, and actually offer help to users with problems and listen to their suggestions and feedback. He's the only one I've seen do so since Mr. de la Llama.)
  3. Joseph MItzen

    Missing The Old Forums

    I've been thinking about it, and since C++ isn't exactly an obscure language, maybe they've gone to the same place non-C++ Builder C++ users go to.
  4. Joseph MItzen

    How to connect to office 365 using proxy server

    Remy, I think you hit your head and have started speaking Java.
  5. Joseph MItzen

    Missing The Old Forums

    So where did the C++Builder users who posted on the old forum go?
  6. Joseph MItzen

    Google Charts in uniGUI

    The documentation and examples are far superior to Steema's TeeChart documentation. Seriously - far superior. Their tutorial dates back to Delphi 7, there's no simple list of charts by type that take you to documentation like you (and every other open source graphing library I'm familiar with across languages) organize their documentation by. There are examples on Github if you can find them, but they have vague titles, no text explanation, contain no code comments, don't show the expected output, and strangest of all, use random data so they wouldn't be reproducible even if you could see a picture of what the output should be!
  7. Joseph MItzen

    Missing The Old Forums

    A few weeks ago I was thinking to myself... boy, do I miss Rudy Velthuis. There's so much I wish I could talk with him about. Then I did some googling and found some archived discussions. I found Rudy and the old, evil version of Nick Hodges arguing that it would be of no benefit at all for Embarcadero to allow users to submit code fixes, also insisting that the Delphi test cases were vast and robust. I was there too, pointing out how useful user-submitted patches have been to open source software, citing the Linux kernel. Then Rudy replied to me that if he had his way, even the Linux kernel wouldn't be allowed to accept code submissions. I drew a few conclusions: Do I still miss Rudy? YES. Was Rudy a very wise and intelligent person to converse with? Yes. Did I enjoy discussing things with Rudy? Yes. Did I enjoy discussing things with Rudy when he got like that? No. It was the toxic environment in the forums that brought people to bombast, rhetoric, refusal to concede points, personal attacks, etc. Do I miss the old forum? NO. Here people can discuss things intelligently without getting nasty or defending a lost cause to the point of being ridiculous. I mean, here we talk about type inference... back on the old forum, I brought up the subject as one of the must-have features for Delphi as soon as possible and one person insisted that type inference was, and I quote, "just the compiler guessing". He continued to insist this after I explained the Handley-Millner Type Inference Algorithm to him, along with its mathematical guarantee of correctness. Then he declared that "a compiler should only do one thing" and type inference would be two things, so it shouldn't be part of the compiler. Another poster went on and on about rejecting modern features in Delphi. Someone asked how they felt about the Delphi string type and they replied that they don't use it where possible, only PChars (!!!). Even Rudy had to concede that this was detrimental and extreme. So... many... weird... conversations there. This place is so much more... sane... in comparison.
  8. Joseph MItzen

    10.4.1+ Custom Managed Records usable?

    IMHO the only true way to do this in pascal is as they've done in Python... like Oxygene, except Oxygene reversed it for for some reason. ilabel = 'Item' if ilist.Count == 1 else 'Items'
  9. Why the heck not? Why waste resources supporting dead operating systems?
  10. Compatibility with versions of Windows that are no longer supported though?
  11. Joseph MItzen

    StrToDate cannot handle dd-MMM-yy format

    Most things seem to use hh:mm. I was just trolling through Google and it looks like Oracle, PostgreSQL, Java all do. Python and C use good old-fashioned case sensitivity, with M for months and m for minutes. This seems to eliminate any ambiguity while still preserving the use of "m" for both months and minutes. Looks like case sensitivity 1, Delphi 0 here. EDIT: Today I learned that if you want to set the time to 00:00:00.00 UTC in PostgreSQL you can use "allballs" as the input string. I may need to file a Delphi feature request immediately....
  12. Joseph MItzen

    RAD Studio 11 Alexandria is now available

    OK, that's two more things I can cross off my list of 35-45 improvements I wanted that I drew up in 2013. At the current rate of one to two items per release, as long as I don't add anything more to the list and they stop taking wishlist items back out (e.g. memory management) maybe another 15 years and I'll be all set. Seriously, I've had this list sitting on my desk since 2013 and every time I encounter something I think Delphi needs I squeeze it onto the same sheet of paper. It's getting rather crowded. It took me a minute to find "binary const" squeezed in between "int to bin" and "automatic memory management".
  13. Joseph MItzen

    RAD Studio 11 Alexandria is now available

    If you are ultimately consumed in sacrifice by Pele the volcano goddess, should we blame Philippe Kahn? https://www.robertshawaii.com/blog/legend-behind-hawaiis-goddess-fire/
  14. Joseph MItzen

    StrToDate cannot handle dd-MMM-yy format

    Woo-hoo! Now they just need support for arbitrary formats and timezeone-aware datetimes....
  15. Joseph MItzen

    RAD Studio 11 Alexandria is now available

    I do! And so does everyone else apparently. As I explained on Reddit last night, according to the Python Enhancement Proposal that was drawn up when Python wanted to add this feature, a version of this feature is already present in Ada, C#, C++, D, Java, Julia, Perl, Ruby, Rust and Swift (and subsequently Python and now Delphi). It makes it much easier to correctly read long numbers and be sure you've entered them correctly. In Python you can also use it to break up hexadecimal constants into words and binary literals into nibbles.
  16. Joseph MItzen

    RAD Studio 11 Alexandria is now available

    No, I found him! He's right here in my home state of New Jersey! https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-borland-7b463131
  17. Joseph MItzen

    RAD Studio 11 Alexandria is now available

    So you're suggesting a better name would have been Delphi 11 Kabul Edition?
  18. Joseph MItzen

    RAD Studio 11 Alexandria is now available

    The QA team missed that it doesn't want to install?
  19. Joseph MItzen

    Delphi FireDAC .Post on Firebird table

    That's... not normal. This is as strange to me as the Delphi user on the old forum who said he never uses Delphi strings, only Pchars. You're not supposed to have control; the database is supposed to have control. You declare what you want and the RDMS query optimizer decides the best way to retrieve it. I can guarantee you there's no query optimizer designed with your "another way" in mind.
  20. Joseph MItzen

    StrToDate cannot handle dd-MMM-yy format

    Nothing that allows specifying the format in a template? OK, just looked; dang, the Datetime utilities are even worse than I remembered, and IMHO they're worse than Turbo Pascal's - which could convert a datetime into a record of all of its elements. With Delphi, datetime completely omits any type of dot notation and your datetime code ends up looking rather like LISP with all the parentheses. Whoever designed Delphi's datetime unit must have never seen another language's datetime library and been mad besides. So... many... functions. Except useful ones. The day Delphi gets optional parameters I'm writing an open source datetime unit for it. Even FreePascal can parse an arbitrary datetime string.... https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/rtl/sysutils/formatdatetime.html
  21. Joseph MItzen

    What it's like to be a Delphi Developer

    Impossible! No one uses IDLE... no one.
  22. Thank you! Delphi has a method for grouping a collection of common procedures/functions together... it's called a Unit.
  23. Joseph MItzen

    What it's like to be a Delphi Developer

    "and RAD Studio is the only tool I have found that actually makes the overall development experience extremely pleasurable. It has everything you need... well thought out, and highly customizable." I'd hate to see what he's comparing it to. Last weekend I was using a JetBrains IDE on Linux. I started creating a constant to hold a Linux path; it was really long, the file system is case-sensitive and I was trying to recall the path from memory. Somehow the Jetbrains IDE recognized that the string I was typing was a directory path and its code completion suddenly switched to offering suggestions to complete the file path. Now instead of almost certainly screwing up the path I was able to get the whole thing entered with just a few keystrokes. My jaw dropped open for a few seconds after the IDE pulled this trick on me. This came on top of discovering when I wanted to suppress a compiler warning that you can turn off warnings on a line-by-line basis for certain warnings or all of them. And this is done by specially-crafted comments so you don't even have to access a menu or use a special key combination to do it. I find it hard to imagine that RAD Studio, which still doesn't have code completion and compiler warnings sorted out after several years, and doesn't even allow key binding customization, is the only IDE that would be bearable to Joe Hecht.
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