Productivity versus Excitement

Many of the commentators in my two recent posts pointed out that the IDE additions and fixes in the forthcoming Delphi 2010 will increase productivity. I have no doubt about that. There’s one in particular I can see saving me quite a bit of time, and that’s the uses units. I use that little tool all the time, and could never understand why it automatically always put the unit in the implementation’s uses clause by default. Why can’t I choose? Well apparently now I can.

One particular comment went on to say that compiler changes, the thing I said might just excite me, could in fact decrease productivity. It takes time to learn new stuff, and if you are spending more time learning, than actually doing things, then you’d not getting things done.

That got me thinking about the Microsoft world, and how it seems that you hardly have started looking at one new technology, before it’s superseded by another. You’ve just about got your head around Winforms, and they spring WPF on you, then you jump on to that bandwagon, and suddenly it’s Silverlight out of the browser that’s the new in thing. Oh wait a minute, WPF and Silverlight doesn’t seem to be doing so good, perhaps we should stick with Winforms. Same on the web development side of things. You start with ASP.NET, get comfortable with ViewState and postbacks, and bam, they bring out ASP.NET MVC and tell you to forget all that (Actually they say they’re keeping both, so you need to decide which is for you). To make things worse, they offer you Silverlight as well. It’s the same wherever you look. Linq to SQL? Well apparently Microsoft now prefer Entity Framework. Well they did. I’m not quite sure anymore.

So yeah, all these new innovations to the language and new technologies do have an effect on your productivity, especially if you are trying them all out. The thing is, it’s human nature to want something new and shiny. Look at mobile phones. Most people use their mobile phones for making and receiving calls and that’s it. Oh, they might try a few of the new features when they first get the phone. Maybe take the occasional photo with their phone, but for the most part, they just make calls. So why do they change their phone every 6 months or so? The phone they had 5 years ago still works great for making those calls. The phone manufactures know it’s human nature to always want the new model. So they oblige and keep churning them out.

Microsoft also know that they can’t just rest on what they’ve got. They’ve got to keep their audience excited. Keep throwing as much new exciting stuff as is possible to keep them coming back for more. So while I agree, I’m as productive as a Microsoft developer who is using C# and Visual Studio, I admit I do go green with envy when that get some new toy!

Delphi Love

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?

Delphi 2010

I know I’m supposed to get excited and all that, but I’m not. Improvements to the IDE, no matter how useful or needed just don’t do it for me. I guess it’s analogous to an accountant getting excited at improvements to his favourite calculator. (although I guess accountancy is so boring that a few new buttons on a calculator might just warm an accountant’s cockles!)

I get excited at real innovation. Improvements to the language for example. Ability to do things with my preferred language that’s either impossible or difficult to do with any other language. Innovation to the underlying Compiler etc etc

I guess I’ll have to wait until Delphi 2011 comes out.

Delphi Generics

Generics was or is one of the flagship features of Delphi 2009. Probably up there with unicode. Unfortunately, I don’t think the time was been put into the feature that it deserves. It feels like a badly implemented third party component. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of communication with the ide. Code completion doesn’t work with generics. Same with class completion. Why not? Refactoring falls over as well.

This was all annoying, but we could almost live with it. Unfortunately we’ve now got a problem, which means we can’t use generics at all. Most of our automated testing is done with Automated QA’s Test Complete. Since we’ve moved to Delphi 2009, we’ve had a major problem, in that the debug information from our Delphi application was not being read properly from Test Complete 7. Here’s my question about it on Stack Overflow. Automated were baffled. We tried writing small test applications, but we couldn’t reproduce the problem. There was something about our application, Test Complete didn’t like. After months of investigation, we finally came to the conclusion that generics was the problem. Luckily, we had actually refactored some of our code to use generics, so it was easy to go back to the previous version. And hey presto, Test Complete is now totally happy.

Automated are now looking at it. I wonder if it’s a Test Complete problem, or is it generics messing up the debug information in the executable?