[Leace]

Not only that but Delphi has tremendous educational potential due to fast feedback loops. There was a blog post once on HN where one of Delphi authors discussed how they designed IDE and the language to be friendly for newcomers.

One could ask why not invest in https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ instead of commercial Delphi though?

[peter_d_sherman]

Leace: "Not only that but Delphi has tremendous educational potential due to fast feedback loops."

Agreed completely!

Not only that, but an argument could be made that the TIME that a given body of source code takes to compile -- can have a huge impact (positive or negative) on programmer productivity...

Case in point: The Linux Kernel (written in C)...

You make a change, even a small one, and you're probably going to wait for HOURS for it to compile...

HOURS...

Before you can run it, to know what your change accomplished (or didn't accomplish!)...

HOURS...

If the Linux Kernel was written in Delphi, compilation would take no more than a few MINUTES, even on a modest machine, and possibly a lot less, possibly seconds, depending on the dependencies of the code that was modified...

That's the technological beauty of a single-pass compiler that caches precompiled source and its associated symbol tables (and only recompiles what's needed, only when it's needed)...

Which change-compile-test-feedback loop do you think would make a programmer more productive?

?

Hint: Even a non-programmer could easily know the difference...

Yes, there are languages which are more popular, more attuned to web development, more Lambda-esque in nature, and these things are virtuous, to be sure -- but in terms of raw compilation/run/test/change/iterate speed (aka productivity), Delphi smokes all of them...

For a programming job in the U.S., with many employers using differing technologies, it may be a loss, but for education, for the ability to learn how to think (as a programmer) and subsequently grow into other tools/technologies, it's a big WIN.

[cesarb]

> Case in point: The Linux Kernel (written in C)...

> You make a change, even a small one, and you're probably going to wait for HOURS for it to compile...

I've done this before. For a small change in a .c file, it takes less than a couple of minutes in a not-so-fast computer. It only has to recompile that .c file, do a partial link of the subsystem, do a final link of the whole kernel, and a few other auxiliary processing steps. It takes more time to reboot the machine or VM with the new kernel.

Even compiling the kernel from scratch is fast. Looking at a Phoronix benchmark (https://openbenchmarking.org/showdown/pts/build-linux-kernel), it takes less than 15 minutes on all systems tested. Some systems can compile the whole kernel from scratch in less than half a minute.

[tluyben2]

I try Lazarus every year; it is still instable. Did it improve over the past year?

[badsectoracula]

In what OS and with what projects are you trying it? I'm using Lazarus since 2006 or so and the last time i remember it being unstable was back in 2008-2009. It has been a very long time since i even saw the IDE crashing, let alone getting a feeling that it is unstable.

(note that i'm using Windows and mainly with my own projects and components and i only use the components that come with Lazarus)

[nurettin]

Nope, still unstable, you still need to chase and file small bugs, still no devexpress, either. But I have to admit they have done great work with the IDE during the past 5 years.