Joseph MItzen

To be fair, the Nick Hodges of today isn't like that anymore. I think once he stopped posting in the old forum he became a much happier person. Even he admitted that that environment tended to bring out the worst in people. Apparently he's now the developer advocate at Rollbar, so he's no longer employed working with Delphi either. I rather like New Nick.

If you're MVP Bruce McGee, getting yourself appointed a moderator of the Delphi subreddit and then deleting or shadowbanning even mildly critical posts, or warning posters to "watch themselves".

Jeroen Wiert-Pluimers lost his MVP status because he kept posting articles about the security flaws on Embarcadero's website that he repeatedly informed them of and they declined to fix. Joanna Carter believed she lost her MVP status when she posted about the cost of Delphi being too high. About ten years ago there was a discussion in the comment section of a blog post from Jolyon Duranko-Smith and Joanna Carter, David Intersimone and Nick Hodges all ended up taking part. Joanna mentioned her belief about losing her MVP status. Hodges and Intersimone kept insisting this wasn't the reason. When Carter asked why then, the response was "You know why!" She insisted she didn't. They said they couldn't say because of privacy issues. She said she'd waive any privacy issues and post the reason. They refused again and continued to decline to tell her why she was removed as an MVP. It was rather bizarre.

You joke about this, but they really think that way! Several years ago when Google Plus still existed, someone in the Delphi group (it wasn't you, was it?) posted a graph they'd made showing bugs closed over time... or maybe it was showing how long until bugs were closed; I forget which. Marco Cantu made a rather aggressive reply to the post that the chart was all wrong because of something (I don't remember), and he was going to post the real graph on his blog. The original poster was very gracious, apologizing for their mistake and looking forward to Marco's blog post. A blog post shows up from Marco purporting to show bugs closed over time and the trend for how long bugs stay open, each looking really nice for Embarcadero. I realize that his chart is conflating actual bugs with bugs closed because of duplicate, feature request, won't fix, can't reproduce, etc. I (and some others) used the blog commenting option to explain this to Marco. Marco declined to approve any of these comments. Instead, he appended a few sentences claiming to summarize what some people had written about the subject. At least in my case, I felt his summary was inadequate and skipped several problems I'd pointed out. His only "fix" was to keep the chart up and just change the word "Bugs" to "Issues" in the title. Now, I was working in data analysis at that time. I was able to back into the actual closed bug counts based on information from his blog post (but not the correct data for average time to close a bug). I made my own chart with the revised numbers; the trend was the opposite from the one on Marco's blog. I shared a link to that chart for him; of course he never approved that comment either and his summary didn't mention that when you took the other non-bugs out the chart trended in the exact opposite direction as the one he posted. Ironically, he claimed to be showing a more accurate version of the data than the chart on Google Plus but his was far less so. Ultimately I realized the purpose of his blog wasn't to actually determine the trend regarding bugs and bug fixes in Delphi over time but to perform damage control over the chart presented in Google Plus. 😞 There's no other explanation for leaving his charts after being made aware of why they were inaccurate and how they skewed the results.

Is that the new Like a Blank Book license?

Scream, cry, beat their fists against their desks in impotent rage?

What the...? It's looking for Python 2.7. Python 2.7 reached end-of-life status Jan. 1 2020! And Python 3.0 came out at the end of 2008. How old are these LLDB binaries?

You're just trying to induce a tear in the fabric of spacetime, aren't you?

There was, but they eliminated the position by firing the VP of Developer Relations and never replacing him.

I think my view of the landscape is 32 bits less limited than your view.

Nice! I'm reminded a bit of the cppyy package for Python, which solved some of the same types of problems by the unorthodox method of embedding cling, a C++ interpreter built on top of clang.

It's 2022. Why does anyone need 32 bit? Windows isn't even available in 32bit anymore starting with Windows 11.

I'm reminded of an American expression "All hat and no cattle...."

That might be more than a story. Remember the good old days when the IDE home page was hacked to display pro-ISIS messages?

How do you know this? How long is it taking? EDIT: Holy *$&# I just learned that you can't directly compare two lists with equals (and get the right answer): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3368225/do-delphi-generic-collections-override-equals

OK, just checking in to say that I've gotten a Access Violation error in rtl280.bpl when trying to install with the latest version of WINE. The fun thing is when one does a Google search on "rtl280.bpl" one gets back five pages of results, basically all of them about error messages from Delphi. I'm going to try fiddling with things some more. Not those workarounds. Those workarounds would have you setting up a 32bit prefix, which won't work for Delphi anymore. It also has other tricks like installing IE8 (which you can't readily do from a 64bit prefix) and installing .NET 3.5. I got to the point I'm at by using a 64bit prefix, installing corefonts and, per one error message, installing .NET 4.5. Now I need to proceed to bear it with a stick. I'm sure the IDE relies upon 76 ancient, proprietary bits of Microsoft software that aren't documented anywhere.....

So it performed identically to running on Windows? I've got a cutting edge Linux desktop; tomorrow I'll give the trial of Rad Studio 11 a go with the latest version of WINE staging (a series of patches on top of WINE) and Valve's Proton fork of WINE if necessary and see if I can get working. I've got a reasonable amount of experience poking Windows software with a stick until it runs under Linux.

Good idea - I'll file an enhancement proposal that Pascal be fixed to treat backslash as an escape character. No more #13#10 in the era of Unicode...

Doesn't using classes, abstract classes, generics, hidden properties, class constructors, and of course a typecast of sorts anyway for such a simple problem make you want to throw up your hands in despair and swear to never use static typing again?

I'm going to have nightmares about your VM tonight. This feels like a worthy goal and a horrible nightmare waiting to happen. Too much Delphi mixed all together can't be good. You know that old urban legend where you say "Bloody Mary" three times in a mirror in a dark room and a ghost appears in the mirror? I fear that if you add three more copies of Delphi to your VM and turn out the lights you'll see a faint image of David Intersimone burned into your monitor.

Is it really complicated? SQLite can store datetimes as ISO8601 (string) , Julian day numbers (real), or Unix time (integer). It has functions for working with all three of these types. Most SQLite drivers I've seen in various languages automatically convert between one of these and the language's own datetime type, and some offer the user the choice of storing the native datetime in any of three types. For those who are interested, SQLite very recently added static type support, which may be of use to those for whom this was a dealbreaker.

Bah; now you've just replaced your Year 2038 Problem with a Year 292,277,026,596 Problem.

What, you don't want to be like me and walk out the door with nothing lined up a few weeks before the Great Recession hits? 🙂 Sorry that post came off a bit too negative... I was just about to go edit it and saw you'd already replied. You're right of course. On the other hand, several years ago one of the employees at EMBT's Romanian facility (back when they had one) showed up in the comments section of a Delphi blog entry about the Romanian unit. After establishing he really worked there, he explained that the wages EMBT were offering were low, even for Romania. He said that Chinese companies also off-shored there and they offered better pay. Because of this, the only people EMBT could get to work for them there were people who had just graduated college (and who studied C++ and Java but not Delphi). He said that these new programmers only took the job to get one year of experience on their resumes, which was enough to get a job with one of the Chinese firms. Hence the folks working on Delphi in Romania didn't care about poor code quality or bugs because they didn't expect to be around long enough to have to fix it. 😞 Another time two of EMBT's Delphi developers showed up in the old forums. Someone began explaining to them the details of some bug that was a complete showstopper for their company and that had no signs of being fixed anytime soon. One developer replied, "See, this is why we don't like to come here." A TeamB member took people to task for bombarding them with their issues but uncharacteristically also told the Delphi developers that their dismissive attitude towards users with problems wasn't appropriate either. The two developers never showed up again. So that's some of what informed my initial response; those working on Delphi haven't always been hard-working and singularly dedicated. On the other other hand 🙂 a source on the U.S. Delphi team at the time told tales of employees having substandard monitors and inadequate server power which led to exceedingly long build times when they wanted to test changes, so they do have a lot to put up with as well. Anyway, I apologize again for my tone; some of that came off targeted at you personally, which was inappropriate.

You criticize others for maintaining insight they don't really have, and then you do the same thing in the same sentence. What we do know about their parent company is that several times in the past after acquiring companies they fired most of the programmers and outsourced the development work to China and other countries with cheaper labor. They also tend to gain new products via acquisition rather than internal development. Embarcadero is privately owned and doesn't have to answer to shareholders. Again, you're being as clairvoyant as those you criticized, but if management doesn't even allow developers to say "this doesn't work" then things are even worse than feared. Things wouldn't even be fixable if people who see problems can't point them out. They can quit and keep their integrity. I've walked before rather than have my name associated with a doomed project when management ignored my concerns. If you don't quit, "I was just following orders" isn't an excuse if you knew better and went ahead and did it anyway.

It doesn't, unbelievably.