[barrkel]

Other language built around IDE support: Delphi.

The compiler was built with callbacks to provide code completion; it runs in process, as a DLL, as part of the IDE.

No accident that Hejlsberg also design C#, and innovated further with TypeScript's language server. He wrote the original Turbo Pascal (IDE + Compiler in the same executable) in assembler, so he's been building IDE + language combos all his life.

[comboy]

Oh Delphi.. every time I fight with CSS and think about how easy making GUI apps used to be almost 20(sic!) years ago, I feel like something went wrong.

Mandatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4

[marktangotango]

So did Delphi handle dynamically resizing and positioning layouts? My impression is all the old highly productive gui languages (Delphi, Visual Basic, ...) used absolute positioning. Personally I'd rather have a more complex gui framework (css, swing, wpf) that handles positioning than to be forever cursed tweaking pixel width, height, x, y values.

[Joeri]

It has anchor layout, flow layout, table layout, etc... I have typically found it easier to do the layout I wanted in delphi than CSS. The only annoying thing is that the visual designer has no undo, which you really miss when doing exploratory designs.

CSS 2 really is terrible. There's a few things in CSS 3 that make it passable, but overall I consider it a failed layout system which needs more workarounds than it provides solutions.

[bitL]

Yes, if you set anchors on each component you wanted to be resizable (more specifically, all four sides could have had an independent anchor).

[flukus]

Same with winforms. I'm not sure if it was added at some point or always there, if it was always there I wish I knew about it a lot sooner.

[JustSomeNobody]

>... than to be forever cursed tweaking pixel width, height, x, y values.

Inevitably, this is what CSS work devolves to, though.[0]

[0] Pixel twiddling

[flukus]

I had to do maintenance on an old winforms app recently, it's insane how simple it is to develop with, how quickly it starts up and how quickly it show users the data they want. I signed myself up as the project maintainer.

And even that is an incredibly bloated technology compared to delphi.

[sheeshkebab]

I've been writing web apps for 20ish years, and also still can't see productivity catching up to what we were doing with Delphi and other desktop uis 25 years earlier... not even with react and all these other webpack/babel heavy things.

Web development...

[askvictor]

Haven't looked at Delphi since last century, but it seems it's still alive, and can produce iOS and Android (and all the desktops) programs. No idea how well though...

[Double_a_92]

It's rubbish. Worst IDE I've ever worked with, sometimes I consider just using Notepad. No day without crashes, random errors, intelliSense not working, debugger suddenly not showing variable values, code navigation not working...

Embarcadero is just milking companies that need Delphi for legacy code.

[panzer_wyrm]

Borland management went wrong. 20 years...

[iamcurious]

For those who want to see how Delphi GUI design is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRMo5JSA9rw

[bitL]

There's always Lazarus...

[jackmott]

yep. yep. yep.

[noir_lord]

My all time favourite languages are (in descending order), Delphi, Turbo Pascal and C#.

It's not a co-incidence that I moved to TypeScript recently and am absolutely loving it, it feels like JS but engineered.

[twoquestions]

Typescript is nice, I just wish it inferred types as well as F#.

[zem]

and smalltalk is perhaps the ultimate example

[vram22]

I've read somewhere (much earlier) that some of the early Borland products were written in assembly language. That's why they were so fast.