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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Happy Delphi 25th anniversary: follow hash tags #Delphi25 and #Delphi25th

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/02/14

I wish I could have prepared something more substantial for the 25th Delphi birthday.

Alas: life has been tough (see below), so please keep an eye on these search terms, hash tags and start posts from past Delphi team key members:

Search term: “Interview with Anders Hejlsberg and Chuck Jazdzewski #Delphi25th”; highlights from it:

  • “The men in this video are responsible for an incalculable amount of software, in one way or another. It boggles the mind to think about their impact on our industry.
    I know, right? If you aren’t using software they were directly involved in, then you are using software inspired by their software.”
  • Delphi 1 being postponed 6 months to ensure the visual designer and live data worked properly; the side effect was top notch quality of other product areas
  • Shipping the RTL and VCL code was very important
  • “If it was done right, we wouldn’t have a job” – had me truly LOL! It is so true! The Windows API was powerful, but hard to use – slightly better today, but still Delphi run circles around any other UI for Win32 tool – VB included.
  • Method Pointers changed the perspective of a lot of software development, even outside the Delphi world
  • Peter Sollich working on the compiler (Wish Peter Sollich was mentioned more; he was instrumental to the compiler.)
  • Garbage Collection is beautiful, but adds a truckload of complexity interfacing to the non-garbage collected underlying Windows API
  • The power of the VCL component model working irrespective of the state (having a Windows Class, Window Handle, etc) of the underlying Windows controls
  • The automatic recreation of underlying controls when certain component properties change is still important today on the supported platforms, for instance when switching from landscape to portrait mode
  • Reference counting (which was already with large strings) only gets you so far, as it can leave isolated islands that never get collected; mark and sweep was hardly used in any other environment
  • The beta/field-test/code names (like Delphi, Wasabi, Mango) depended on the group of people they were sent to
  • “Very important was that the Delphi 2.0 compiler and VCL was long underway before Delphi 1 was released. That made the transition from Win16 to Win32 so much easier.
    Yes, and really interesting in terms of strategic planning”
  • “I think Monet was ObjectVision 1.0 I think -and ObjectVision 3.0 was bundle with TurboC as I remenber it – I was PM on that in Scandinavia. :)”
  • Chuck is now working at Google on a new framework for Android Development called “Compose”.
  • Anders worked for a short while on Visual J++, then on C# and .NET, then adding TypeScript, and helped Microsoft move from inward oriented company to opening up to open source. He now spends his time committing code to github (github.com/ahejlsberg) because he wanted to go back to coding instead of managing.
  • “If playback doesn’t begin shortly, try restarting your device.” It stopped playing as soon as you switched to YouTube.
    Sorry. Must be a network issue. We will send out a replay link.”
  • “The first time I used Pascal, it was Compas Pascal – also written by Anders Heijlsberg. Now he is behind C# and TypeScript – he surely is leaving a major mark on the runestones of software development!”
  • DogFood is important; Turbo Pascal and Delphi were among the first; C# and TypeScript now do this too.
  • “Will the anniversary page Delphi.embarcadero.com be available in future also ?
    Yes, that is the plan. We made it Delphi.embarcadero.com instead of Delphi25. so we can keep it around. Plus we have more content comming on there.”
  • The Delphi compiler version actually started at 1.0 for Turbo Pascal 1.0
  • “Official MS Windows Me image for Virtual Box can be found at https://archive.org/details/win_me_archive_vdi“
  • DavidI: Special respect to my “Twin separated at birth” Charlie Calvert for training the world on Delphi !!!
  • [WayBack] (PDF) Borland Software Craftsmanship: A New Look at Process, Quality and Productivity
    A:This is a great paper. By coincidence I actually saw it less than two days ago!
  • “Don’t forget Cary Jensen, I have met him at the first Delphi courses in Amsterdam ~24 years ago. I hope he is well!”
  • “Don’t forget InterBase has been there all the time along the way too! And still going strong, and across all the same target platforms!”
  • “How about a line profiler built-in, rather than having to purchase and install AQTime?”
  • “This site has VirtualBox virtual machine images for all legacy versions of Windows, including “Window 3.1” … http://virtualdiskimages.weebly.com/virtualbox.html“
  • “I agree with the very useful feature of being able to make Windows versions of the mobile apps. This is one, that is being used exactly for that… multipurpose. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danvaegt.SmartWeighClient“

A few of my recent tweets:

 

Delphi 25th pages

The Embarcadero Delphi home page temporarily has a 25th anniversary theme (hopefully I can save even more out-links in the WayBack machine in due time):

I do want to thank a few of the people of the Borland Amsterdam office, for which I did the technical presentation part roughly in the Borland Pascal through Delphi 1 days:

  • Geertien Stuit
  • Gerard van der Pol
  • Gidi Schmidt
  • Marcel Timmers
  • Margreet van Muyden
  • Martin van der Togt
  • Martin Pamdeth
  • Sylvia Witteman
  • Wim Hoek

The list is not complete; the below status has a huge impact on my memory. I’m sure more names pop-in my mind later, so the above list will be more complete in due time.

Delphi

The question “Is it Delfai or Delfee?” (besides only Delfee being right) only has just right answer: [Archive.is] Danny Thorpe on Twitter: “Yes!… “.

Delphi, not AppBuilder

Despite you can still find the AppBuilder name in various parts of the product, I’m glad it was called by code name Delphi.

For posterity:

Current status

This has made me do far less software development over the last 6 months:

  • Me fighting rectal cancer, recovering from radiation therapy, and having major surgery coming up in a few weeks time leading to permanent colostoma (most likely) or temporary ileostoma (very small chance)
  • Eega trying to figure out which physical symptoms match what lab/scan results turning up ~20 years after her sarcoma, and recovering from large cyste surgery 9 weeks ago
  • Us finding new caretakers for mentally retarded brother as the current ones fail at signaling and assessing his behaviour and state
  • Us coaching the care-team around my mom who has rapidly increasing Alzheimer’s

The blog is on auto-post (with a queue filled for roughly 2 years).

Most news is on the pinned post (which changes every few weeks) at [Archive.is] Jeroen Pluimers (@jpluimers) | Twitter

Hopefully: [Archive.is] Jeroen Pluimers on Twitter: “(: After recovery (see profile; it will take considerable time) we plan to do a west-coast and maybe even “larger USA” visit so we can say hi to many people from that era. It’s gonna be relatively low budget, so let us know if you like say hi, or have ideas on route/stay.… https://t.co/xYzjzuwVHj”

Bookshelf and disk collection

This is just a tiny part of my Bookshelf related to Delphi and Turbo Pascal. The shelves are 3 books deep, so hopefully in the future, there is much more to cover (:

Pictures from the above tweets:

And a few older pictures:

–jeroen

Delphi Developer Stories by Alister Christie

All questions and answers from the webinar

Questions

This entry was posted on 2020/02/14 at 17:24 and is filed under Delphi, Development, Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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