[danielbarla]

This could be argued infinitely, I think. I do appreciate your points; yes, simply adding code - by default or by itself - does not resolve those things I mentioned. But, it's important to view my comments within the context of what we were talking about, which was the defacto development style that grew around Delphi, especially in the early days (before their libraries got smarter). In the case of my "SELECT *" example, this was quite often literally the case - queries were not optimised in the least bit regarding the columns and rows that were being retrieved (mostly due to lack of awareness or laziness). In terms of correctness, you can bet that business rules were usually sprinkled around the UI in a happenstance kind of way, rather than being collected in a relatively well defined, easy to verify and unit test business object, say. Again, while I do agree in theory that "more code" does not necessarily solve anything, these are the kinds of practicalities I am arguing about, not on a pure level. The tooling was great for getting things done instantly, but encouraged a laziness that caused a counter revolution which went too far in the opposite direction.

[jonnypotty]

My work until recently was working on one of the Delphi apps you're talking about. Not in terms of unoptimised queries but bad separation of business logic and ui. But the product has passed between 4 diffent companies and is over 20 years old now, I just don't see how you prevent these issues. I do see what you're saying, but I think the real issues is humans which hasn't changed.

[danielbarla]

Agreed, and I also don't have a real answer. At least, not a technological one. The closest we can get it is a bunch of developers who care about a product, ask themselves lots of "why do we do it this way", and "could this be done better", and try to come up with some solid answers. Of course, with products that survived 10+ years of maintenance, it is highly unlikely that enough time will be afforded to any team.

Circling back to what I was trying to say with the first comment - I suspect the rapid development promise and culture back in the day led to a lot of these apps being developed. The tooling was just an enabler.