<story><title>22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks</title><url>http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2017-january-22years-delphi.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wtbob</author><text>A weak point, though, is JavaScript — quite possibly the worst popular computer language in history.  I honestly think I&amp;#x27;d rather starve than write another line of JavaScript again.  Even reading JavaScript diffs from other guys on my team is a horrible, terrible experience.  It&amp;#x27;s just a sad, awful, miserable, verbose, broken language.&lt;p&gt;As a compilation target from a better language, I suppose it&amp;#x27;s mostly acceptable.  But on its own?  Never again.</text></item><item><author>metachris</author><text>The strong point of Electron is easy _cross-platform_ application development and packaging (spits out .exe, .app and Linux binary), with no further dependencies. Ever tried packaging a QT application for Mac, Windows and Linux? I can tell you it&amp;#x27;s a painful experience, one I don&amp;#x27;t want to repeat.&lt;p&gt;Also HTML+CSS allows for extremely versatile styling and fine-grained control of appearance.</text></item><item><author>yoodenvranx</author><text>Delphi is still unrivaled when it comes to rapid GUI prototyping in combination with easy deployment. It&amp;#x27;s much easier than QT&amp;#x2F;GTK and you usually get a standalone .exe with no external dependencies.&lt;p&gt;I really want to cry when I see the current alternatives... Node&amp;#x2F;Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tazjin</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not just that the language is bad, it&amp;#x27;s also that the ecosystem encourages bloat and terrible implementations with layers of fixes glued on top of each other.&lt;p&gt;My current main work laptop (a pre-TouchBar generation MBP) can only barely run a &amp;quot;heavy&amp;quot; JS-application like Slack and something like IntelliJ at the same time.&lt;p&gt;Migrating Slack into an IRC client reduces the CPU &amp;amp; memory footprint of _sending, receiving and displaying text_ by over 90%.&lt;p&gt;Something went seriously wrong somewhere and we&amp;#x27;re only going deeper into the hole.</text></comment>
<story><title>22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks</title><url>http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2017-january-22years-delphi.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wtbob</author><text>A weak point, though, is JavaScript — quite possibly the worst popular computer language in history.  I honestly think I&amp;#x27;d rather starve than write another line of JavaScript again.  Even reading JavaScript diffs from other guys on my team is a horrible, terrible experience.  It&amp;#x27;s just a sad, awful, miserable, verbose, broken language.&lt;p&gt;As a compilation target from a better language, I suppose it&amp;#x27;s mostly acceptable.  But on its own?  Never again.</text></item><item><author>metachris</author><text>The strong point of Electron is easy _cross-platform_ application development and packaging (spits out .exe, .app and Linux binary), with no further dependencies. Ever tried packaging a QT application for Mac, Windows and Linux? I can tell you it&amp;#x27;s a painful experience, one I don&amp;#x27;t want to repeat.&lt;p&gt;Also HTML+CSS allows for extremely versatile styling and fine-grained control of appearance.</text></item><item><author>yoodenvranx</author><text>Delphi is still unrivaled when it comes to rapid GUI prototyping in combination with easy deployment. It&amp;#x27;s much easier than QT&amp;#x2F;GTK and you usually get a standalone .exe with no external dependencies.&lt;p&gt;I really want to cry when I see the current alternatives... Node&amp;#x2F;Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bigtunacan</author><text>Every programming language has it&amp;#x27;s warts.  JavaScript is in a unique position in terms of the level of backwards compatibility it is required to maintain.  It integrates some powerful features with it&amp;#x27;s lisp-y functional style and closures.  It&amp;#x27;s implementation of prototypal inheritence isn&amp;#x27;t the greatest I&amp;#x27;ve seen, but it&amp;#x27;s by far the most successful prototype based language and that is something I personally wouldn&amp;#x27;t mind seeing become more mainstream.&lt;p&gt;Despite thinking JavaScript itself has some really great qualities; I generally don&amp;#x27;t think Electron is a great solution for desktop applications.  Executables are too large and slow compared to a good old fashioned native application.</text></comment>