I was rather surprised at the comments to my last post. Some were pretty heated. Delphi developers are extremely protective of their baby, but I knew that already. I didn’t actually think my post was that provocative, but perhaps it was.
A good number commented that what has been released so far is only the tip of the iceberg, and that beta testers were not allowed to reveal more yet. That’s all well and good, but I can only comment on what I have seen. When more is revealed, I no doubt will add further comments.
Actually, I never said 2010 sucks. I just said that I’m not that excited yet. I didn’t say others wouldn’t be excited. I just said that I, personally, in my humble opinion, need more than IDE changes to get my blood stirring.
Each release of Delphi Prism excites me for example. They seem to be forever adding little goodies to the compiler. Perhaps it’s easier to do with the .NET platform?
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"Delphi developers are extremely protective of their baby"
Yup, we care. We b**ch and moan and groan, complain and cuss, abuse the developers and ride our favorite hobby horse.
But we care.
One of the things that have been bugging me about Delphi over the years is this need to expand into other coding markets and experiment with other technologies. Not a problem, but it was always at the expense of an ignored Delphi. How many times have I heard everyone complain that Delphi resources were being used to promote these other products. We B*7ched, moaned, blogged and complained to Borland, CodeGear, and now EMB. about it for years. And guess what, they finally turned their heads around and started to listen. Please why are we complaining about these little features? If coming from d2009 to d2010, you might want to wait. I did from d2007 to d2009. And so what, there is not going to be some new coding technology that is going to change the way a method is structured. I was reading another blog about movable breakpoints. Oh my god, do you know how much time that is going to save me? The naysayers to non-naysayers is about 50-50. I want everyone to stop and think to themselves, do you want EMB. to go back to ignoring the Delphi's IDE again, so we can have new COOL technologies? Or, have them go out and spend Delphi resources again turn create some new product like Delphi Fortran (I used that one before, thought I pull him out again)? No, they are now looking to the IDE, OpenTools, Help system, the Debugger, the Project Manager, IDE Insight, and others. Thanks guys. And thanks for coming back to the product.
You never said Delphi 2010 sucks. You also never said "yet." In fact, the last sentence of your post conveyed you have past judgment already on 2010 and it was not enough.
"I guess I’ll have to wait until Delphi 2011 comes out."
Rather than insinuate the Delphi 2010 supporters are over protective zealots, your "Delphi Love" article should have been titled "Delphi Pre-judgment," and you would go on to explain how you retract your previous opinion and will wait until all features are introduced before making judgment. Yes, that requires sucking back a little pride, but pride can be such a bitch some times.
Kyle, yeah perhaps I pre-judged (I have no problem admitting that or anything else). But I did so on the information available. I can't speculate on what has not been made public yet. If in the coming weeks, as more information comes out, I'll let you know if any of it excites me.
Well, as was also pointed out, it was made quite clear in many cases (admittedly not all) that there was more, non-IDE related information to come.
Those of use that attended DelphiLive! back in May even speculated - in an informed fashion - as to what that additional news might entail, and some of it is VERY exciting indeed.
As for constant compiler improvements....
I can see the attraction, but I also see that such things are very costly in terms of developer productivity.
I can already hear some people coughing and spluttering and reaching for their keyboards to protest that compiler changes INcrease productivity. But each new feature takes time to learn and (more importantly) even more time to learn how to use properly.
If a developer is constantly adjusting to his tools because each new release brings more things to get to grips with, then it's self evident that he's spending less time effectively USING those tools.
The Delphi language really didn't change *much* since Delphi 4, but I'd say it took me 5 years of full time use (thru various Delphi versions) to properly learn how to effectively and efficiently use the language, and that's starting from a position of having already been using Delphi since version 1.
And I look back at some of the code that I produced whilst I was still learning, and it makes me shudder to think what I would produce now if I were to jump in and start producing huge volumes of code using generics and other such things.
I'm confident that I can be more meaningfully productive using a 7 year old language than someone using the latest greatest compiler innovations.
By which I mean not just churning out some code in the shortest possible time, but producing code that is both functionally correct and easily understood and maintainable by someone other than me.
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