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by bitwize 258 days ago
> VB and Tcl/Tk are very different at a fundamental level.

Well, yes, I get that—and I much prefer Tcl. What I meant was it filled the role of "tool you use to get a GUI together quickly", especially in the early 90s. Gambas and Lazarus were not around back then.

Lazarus is closer to Delphi than VB, and I've found it to be clunky also in practice if not in principle; Delphi took on a lot of production workload in the 90s, and having an open source workalike would be a boon to business. We seem to have trashed tools that enabled line-of-business apps to be built by single devs, only for AI companies to sell that ability back to us again in the form of LLM assistance. Sometimes I hate this civilization.
1 comments
badsectoracula 258 days ago
The main difference between Delphi/Lazarus and classic VB is that in classic VB you can pause the program and run commands in the paused program - i.e. running it in a "half-alive" state, though it wasn't fully editable as many changes requiring restarting.

On the other hand Delphi/Lazarus has a much more capable language and richer set of components (and in Lazarus' case much better support for automatic layouts), which IMO is better overall.

But yeah, in the 90s Lazarus didn't exist (Delphi did though) - IIRC it was made around 2000 or so but it was really janky for most of the 2000s.

Note that Delphi (and Lazarus) is used for a lot more than LoB apps. It was used a lot by shareware developers for example (and some still use it, e.g. IIRC both Beyond Compare and Total Commander still use Delphi - with Lazarus for crossplatform and/or 64bit builds).

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luismedel 257 days ago
I remember not only running commands while debugging. I remember moving the program counter back, until a statement above my breakpoint, making live changes in the code and stepping it again until the breakpoint to see the effects of my changes without needing to restart the program.
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badsectoracula 257 days ago
Yes, but as i wrote "though it wasn't fully editable as many changes requiring restarting".

FWIW this was actually something you could do in QBasic too.

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cmacleod4 258 days ago
"pause the program and run commands in the paused program" - that's often possible in Tcl too. There are various ways to interact with a running program, query or modify variables, run commands, load updated code, etc.
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badsectoracula 257 days ago
Yeah that is what i mentioned with the Visual Tcl bit above but the comparison here was with Delphi/Lazarus.
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