Are there any Delphi programmers here? A firm I'm interested in working at has a job specification containing Delphi as a requirement, but I'm a bit at a loss at what exactly is the use of this language (not in a negative way). What language can it compare to and why is it chosen over that language? (The IDE is also very expensive, why do firms buy it?)
>>55356792
Practice with Object Pascal using Lazarus. Adapting your skills to Delphi won't take you long if you'll get the job.
>>55356934
Thanks for your reply. Why is this language used? I can't seem to find a strong reason to use this above for example C?
It's just a 90s OOP that got marketed a lot in corporations. A bit like Visual Basic I suppose.
It's most likely chosen because they have always used it and/or their infrastructure relies on it. I don't think anyone compares it against other languages and makes a decision, their firm just uses Delphi and that's that.
>>55357181
Before the rise of C# and .NET, Delphi used to be the only sane choice to build decent, maintainable GUI programs for Windows.
Pascal and other Wirthian languages (Oberon, Ada, Object Pascal) are built on stronger foundations than C and most of its derivatives and IMHO they're nicer to work with. I think it's a shame none of them became THE systems programming language.
>>55357473
I'm seeing (Open) Pascal supporting other OS-es next to Windows, does that mean that Pascal allows for a write once use everywhere GUI? In that case it would have a serious advantage over .NET right?
>>55357552
You mean Object Pascal/Lazarus? Apparently yes, they support Win/Mac/*nix and Haiku too.
I can't vouch for portability myself because the only time I've used it was to compile Transmission Remote GUI on Linux. It worked fine, the program works, and it looks OK.
>>55358074
Did you use the pascal only to write the GUI? If so, what is connecting to a program in another language called? (sorry for the extremely newb question)
>>55358447
I do not work on that project, I only compiled it. AFAIK it uses Transmission's RPC to communicate with the daemon.
