The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Archive for the ‘Delphi’ Category

In memory of Matthias Eißing (Embarcadero, formerly Borland/Inprise/Borland/CodeGear)

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/02/16

Earlier today, I got the sad news that my friend Matthias Eißing suddenly passed away in the night from Tuesday to Wednesday.

Valentines day will never be the same.

Rest in Peace dear Matthias Eißing. Hope you will virtually keep drinking beer and keep the great conversations that made you so many friends going.

🕯️

[Wayback/Archive] Eine sehr traurige Nachricht – Delphi-PRAXiS

Mit einer Mischung aus blankem Entsetzen und großer Trauer muss ich Euch leider mitteilen, dass unser langjähriges Community-Mitglied Matthias Eißing in der Nacht zu Mittwoch plötzlich und völlig unerwartet verstorben ist.

Helping others with is technical knowledge was what Matthias loved doing so much: in person (see [Wayback/Archive] Matthias Eißing – Entwickler Konferenz and [Wayback/Archive] Programm | EKON 27 – Die Entwickler Konferenz für Delphi & more), virtual (watch  [Wayback/Archive] Magdeburger Developer Days 2021 03.09.2021 – Matthias Eißing “Delphi Community Edition” – YouTube), individually (uncountable chat messages, phone and video calls, e-mails and in-company meetings), white papers / blog posts (like [Wayback/Archive] HighDPI Entwicklung unter Windows) and forum messages (just see the list at [Wayback/Archive] Delphi-PRAXiS – Ergebnis der Suchanfrage).

I had hoped to meet at EKON28 again, as our story goes back to the very first [Wayback/Archive] EKON – The Conference for Delphi & More in 1997 @ the Raunheim Astron Hotel Rhein-Main organised by Masoud Kamali ([Wayback/Archive] Massi Kamali (@MasoudMassi) / Twitter).

EKON was the first conference by Masoud/S&S. It and later conferences helped the Astron Hotels in the southern Frankfurter area (a few years Raunheim, Rüsselsheim and many years Mörfelden) grow a lot and it was the base were Matthias and a lot of other developers kept meeting up and started to know about each others personal lives as well.

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Posted in About, borland, Delphi, Development, History, Personal, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Watching “Why is C# Evolving This Way?” strengthened my realisation that the Delphi 12 language by now is light years behind C# 12

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/12/07

Though after C# 4 (covariance and contravariance) and C# 5 (async/await) the evolvement of C# might have seemed to slow down a bit, the big picture hasn’t as shown in the [Wayback/Archive] Why is C# Evolving This Way? – YouTube video by Zoran Horvat which comes down to:

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Posted in .NET, C#, Delphi, Development, Software Development | 9 Comments »

Happy birthday Turbo Pascal! Some marketing and Borland Conference videos

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/20

Some of you might remember [WayBack] Borland – Wikipedia, that today in 1983 shipped the first version of Turbo Pascal [Wikipedia].

It was of great influence, leading to other Turbo languages, Delphi, and – through it’s creator Anders Hejlsberg – eventually C#, .NET and TypeScript.

From the mid 1990s until the early 2000s, the Borland organised conferences (having various names, like Borland Language Conference, Borland Conference, Borland Developers Conference, Inprise Conference) had famous opening videos, and product marketing videos.

Some of them are below the signature.

Hopefully by the time of publishing, all of them are still there.

Edit 20231202:

I scheduled this post back in Winter 2019/2020 in between radiation therapy and surgery.

By now, more information on the anniversary has appeared online.

For more Turbo Pascal history, including – in reverse chronological order – old screenshorts and the first advertisements (and how quickly they changed from the pink on white to full colour ones), see my 2021 blog post Much Turbo Pascal history (via What is a Delphi DCU file? – Stack Overflow). It had many screenshots including a Turbo Pascal 1.0 screenshot, which I have added it here to the right. By now  Turbo Pascal – Wikipedia and Borland Graphics Interface – Wikipedia are quite complete history of Turbo Pascal.

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Posted in .NET, C#, Delphi, Development, Pascal, QC, Software Development, Turbo Pascal | Leave a Comment »

Memories of the Twitter Fail Whale that got discontinued 10 years ago (HT @YiyingLu, @failwhale).

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/01

From 2008 to fall 2013, Twitter used the Fail Whale, a 2006 artwork by Yiying Lu originally titled “Lifting A Dreamer”, to indicate problems on their site.

Now that it is about a year after Musk burned some 44 milliard USD buying Twitter, it is also 10 years ago they phased out the Fail Whale, so it is a good time to remember it and a reminder to check out how Twitter faired during Elon’s ownership.

With Twitter down, you’d see the image from [Wayback/Archive] Yiying Lu 🐳 🥟🧋 on Twitter: “It has been 10 years since my art piece “Lifting a Dreamer” became the Twitter Fail Whale, a symbol as @Twitter’s service outrage during 2008-2013. It has inspired hundreds, probably thousands, of funny, clever & amusing homages and take-offs from users globally. Here are a few: …”:

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Posted in Delphi, Development, History, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter | Leave a Comment »

Bruce Tate on Twitter: “What’s the most unique feature of your favorite programming language?”

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/08/24

For my link archive: [Wayback/Archive] Bruce Tate on Twitter: “What’s the most unique feature of your favorite programming language?” / Twitter

From the languages that I have been using most:

It was a kind of follow-up on his earlier tweet that also sparked nice responses at [Archive] Bruce Tate on Twitter: “What is a #programming technique or construct that other people like but you think is overused?” / Twitter.

In my respons I phrased my decades long pet peeve [Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers on Twitter: “@redrapids OOP: inheritance over composition. This leads to deep hierarchies that eventually nobody understands.” / Twitter.

Whereas with OOP (object-oriented programming) one should use composition over inheritance, often the reverse is true.

Actually my take can be generalised into two directions as these hierarchies:

  1. often crowd a single namespace, so: crowding namespaces is bad.
    One does see this outside the Object Oriented realm a well.
  2. often have many levels of indirection, so: overdoing indirection is bad
    One does see this outside the Object Oriented realm a well, just not as pronounced.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, C#, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Pascal, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Ask Delphi

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/02/21

LOL, Ionica taught me about a [Wayback/Archive] Ask Delphi “oracle”.

So I could not resist:

Ask Delphi:
Is Delphi a programming language?
Delphi speculates:
“It’s expected”

Don’t take the ethics of this “oracle” too seriously, as it is based on AI and we all know how that depends on the data it has been trained with.

Via:

jeroen

Posted in Awareness, Delphi, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

State machines in Delphi and .NET

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/02/15

Forgot to schedule this in 2014, so here it finally is, as the content is still relevant:

A long time ago (almost 10 years) I did some stuff with State Machines in .NET.

Since then the world has changed, and a lot more libraries have become available.

As I mainly use .NET and Delphi and there is a reasonable chance I need to do some more state machine work, here are some links about State Machines in both environments.

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Posted in .NET, C#, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Diagram, Event, Java, Java Platform, Software Development, UML | Leave a Comment »

Enabling GitHub pages to a HTML or markdown GitHub project is dead easy: Delphi deadlockempire is now hosted on github.io

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/01/10

A while ago I wrote about Setting up a GitHub project so it is served over https as a github.io and a custom subdomain.

Doing the full “host on your custom domain” route was a big tougher than I hoped for, so I totally forgot how easy it is to convert an existing HTML or markdown documentation repository to use GitHub pages without a custom domain.

I needed it for the Delphi version of the DeadLockEmpire (see links below, originally it was an interactive tutorial game focusing on the C# language and .NET runtime), as I am trying to get as much as my stuff published and hosted in a manner that will outlive me (I still have a pretty high chance of the rectum cancer metastases returning).

Enabling GitHub Pages on your repository is almost as easy as hosting a page through raw.githack.com (where I already hosted raw.githack.com/jpluimers/deadlockempire.github.io/feature/Delphi-language-and-Delphi-RTL/index.html as raw.githack.com/jpluimers/deadlockempire.github.io/feature/Delphi-language-and-Delphi-RTL/index.html and rawcdn.githack.com/jpluimers/deadlockempire.github.io/feature/Delphi-language-and-Delphi-RTL/index.html).

This is how easy it was to get it hosted as [Wayback/Archive] jpluimers.github.io/deadlockempire.github.io:

  1. In my [Wayback/Archive] jpluimers/deadlockempire.github.io: The Deadlock Empire: Slay dragons, learn concurrency! repository, go to the Settings tab, then click on Pages:
    DeadLockEmpire Settings tab, Pages configuration None

    DeadLockEmpire Settings tab, Pages configuration None.

    Here you see “None” as value for the branch to be published as GitHub Pages.

  2. Here I have chosen the Branch “feature/Delphi-language-and-Delphi-RTL” to be published, and am about to press “Save” (full screenshot below):
    DeadLockEmpire Pages selecting the correct branch

    DeadLockEmpire Pages selecting the correct branch

  3. After pressing “Save“, the site gets published (it takes about a minute for that to complete) at [Wayback/Archive] jpluimers.github.io/deadlockempire.github.io:
    DeadLockEmpire Pages the correct branch has been saved

    DeadLockEmpire Pages the correct branch has been saved which will automagically publish it.

That was it. No more steps.

Each new commit in the selected branch will auto-publish as well.

Related DeadLockEmpire posts

  1. 2016 – If you thought you could do multi-threading, then play “The Deadlock Empire” games.
  2. 2017 – ThreadBarrier/ThreadBarrier.pas at master · lordcrc/ThreadBarrier
  3. 2020 – Davidlohr Bueso on Twitter: A programmer had a problem. He thought to himself, “I know, I’ll solve it with threads!”. has Now problems. two he
  4. [WayBack] One second code: Do YOU know how much your computer can do in a second? is a quiz version of the [WayBack] Numbers Every Programmer Should Know By Year. [WayBack] About this game revealed…Source: One second code: Do YOU know how much your computer can do in a second? « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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Posted in .NET, About, C#, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, Personal, Software Development, Web Development | 1 Comment »

Thinking about you today Paweł

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/12/13

Today it is 5 years ago that Paweł passed away. For me it is hard to believe that I’m still around and this post feels like yesterday: R.I.P. Paweł Głowacki – you will be dearly missed, not just in the Delphi community

Thinking about you today Paweł!

–jeroen

Posted in About, borland, Delphi, Development, Health, History, Personal, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Reminder to self: write a more extensive blog post on Delphi style guides and code style in general

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/11/30

A while ago, Uwe Raabe reminded me about the Delphi Style Guide which is on-line at the Embarcadero document wiki:

He reminded me to write a bit more about Delphi Style Guides, as there are a few and I used them on past conference sessions.

I thought either the blog post or the conference sessions were already online.

Nope, no 2010 conference sessions at [Wayback/Archive] jpluimers/Conferences: Materials for the conferences that Jeroen Wiert Pluimers spoke on., and no blog post yet.

Hopefully over time I will update that repository, but for now: here is a summary of Delphi Style Guides and a short hint on why to get naming conventions right.

I might extend both in a later blog post, health and time permitting.

Delphi Style Guides

Style guides I found in the past as files named in those session materials:

The above also made me find this interesting post: [Wayback/Archive] Delphi-PRAXiS – Einzelnen Beitrag anzeigen – Delphi Einrücken ::: ::: Wie rückt ihr ein? which mentions these style guides (I modified all links to point to the most recent WayBack machine version that is complete)):

  • Borland empfiehlt folgende Formatierungsregeln:
    http://community.borland.com/article/0,1410,10280,00.html
    Der Punkt 3 “naming conventions” schweigt sich aber über Deine Frage aus 
  • Deutsche Übersetzung der Borland Style Guides
    http://www.dsdt.info/grundlagen/styleguide/
    Unsere Freunde von dsdt.info haben sich die Mühe gemacht und dem Text ins deutsche Übersetzt.
    Damit gibt es nun keine Ausreden mehr sich nicht an die Richtlinien zu halten 
  • Delphi 4 Developer’s Guide Coding Standards Document
    von Econos – Stefan Hoffmeister (1998)
    basiert auf dem Coding standard von Xavier Pacheco and Steve Teixeira
    http://www.econos.de/delphi/cs.html
    Hier gibt es auch eine Liste mit Präfixen zu den einzelnen Komponenten
  • Delphi Object Pascal Coding and Project Organization Standard
    von Michael P. Hollis and Mark S. Lauter
    http://onelauter.com/codestandards/
    Hier wird zwar auch nicht auf die Präfixe eingegangen, aber es wird unter anderem auch eine Verzeichnisstruktur vorgeschlagen.
    Solch ein Dokument mit den einzuhaltenden Regeln sollte in jedem Projekt / Team existieren.
  • Delphi coding Standards
    Maintained by Mustafa GÖKMEN
    http://gokmen.selcuk.edu.tr/document…/delphi/cs.php
    Hier ist auch eine Liste mit Präfixen enthalten
  • Delphi Identifier Naming Conventions
    von Zarko Gajic
    it made it into the WayBack machine
    Dieser Artikel befasst sich nur mit der Benamung von Variablen

The dstgroup version is based on WayBack: onelauter.com/codestandards/CodeStandards.doc.

Mixed emotions conventions

Anyway, this is the piece of code by Uwe Raabe that made me frown as it mixes two Delphi styles at once and uses improper meanings in names:

procedure TSearchForm.StartSearch;
begin
  StatusBar.SimpleText := '';
  dspFiles.Clear;
  Files.Clear;
  BeginSearch;
  SearchFolder(edtRootFolder.Text, edtSearchPattern.Text);
  EndSearch;
end;
 
procedure TSearchForm.SearchFolder(const APath, ASearchPattern: string);
var
  arr: TArray;
  dir: string;
begin
  arr := TDirectory.GetFiles(APath, ASearchPattern);
  AddFiles(arr);
  { release memory as early as possible }
  arr := nil;
  for dir in TDirectory.GetDirectories(APath) do begin
    if not TDirectory.Exists(dir) then Continue;
    SearchFolder(dir, ASearchPattern);
  end;
end;
 
procedure TSearchForm.AddFiles(const AFiles: TArray);
begin
  Files.AddStrings(AFiles);
  dspFiles.Items.Count := Files.Count;
  StatusBar.SimpleText := Format('%d files found', [Files.Count]);
end;

This is the start of technical debt, and resulted in the below cool Twitter thread.

Note that I intentionally used “Digital Signal Processor” as dsp abbreviations are very context sensitive, causing truckloads of problems especially when switching between functionality at front and technical stuff at front in naming conventions.

Functionally, it could have made very much sense to add files into a list to be passed onto a Digital Signal Processor for pre- or post-processing of signals.

Uwe uses this Style Guide (which regrettably does not pay tribute to the original author):

So yes, Uwe posted a cool example on how to apply technology properly, and I retweeted it as this: [Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers on Twitter: “Async Tasks in VCL Projects. Cool example on how to properly to Async in VCL. Important thought: please do not mix naming conventions like Uwe does, as it is substantially adds to your technical debt.… “

It is also a reminder for me to phrase this into the positive form: stick to one naming convention as it makes less technical debt creep in. Like Uwe, I learn new things every day and be reminded it is hart to not follow old habbits.

–jeroen

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, Software Development | Leave a Comment »