
Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students - ch_123
https://jonlennartaasenden.wordpress.com/2020/01/20/turkey-buys-delphi-licenses-for-an-estimated-one-million-students/
======
arghwhat
This reminds me of a few (<10) years back when a high school student needed
some C programming assistance.

I then found out that they were being taught to use _Borland Turbo C_.

I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time
learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow
got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools
they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on
land because its all they know.

~~~
Andrew_nenakhov
Borland C and Pascal were great for learning programming in mid-90s, because
of one crucial feature: an immensely good built in help reference.

Whenever you wanted to know syntax of some command, you print this command,
press ctrl-f1 and is presented with docs, _complete with a working example_.
It was insanely great. Remember, stack overflow didn't exist then.

~~~
devpts11
Stack Overflow has dumbed people down significantly because of the mental
laziness it engenders.

In a time before the internet, it used to be that books, and occasionally
magazines, were the initial entry points to understanding software, hardware
and electronics. Then the BBS came along, these secret islands of knowledge
and trade.

I learned Pascal and assembly on Turbo Pascal with trial-and-error and lots of
context-sensitive help. These days, development is mostly fragmented and half-
working. Progress is neither linear, increasing nor assured, and much is lost,
reinvented not necessarily as well and lost again.

Also, eventually coding will decline or bifurcate more because general AI will
allow non-programmers to ask a machine to do Star Trek-like self-programming.
Essentially all office jobs are vulnerable to elimination as mechanical
machine operators.

~~~
pjc50
Speaking as someone who learned in the Turbo Pascal / Turbo C era,
StackOverflow has moved the state of the art on _hugely_ , and people's
dependency on it is more a symptom of the environements they are working in
than anything else.

> Progress is neither linear, increasing nor assured, and much is lost,
> reinvented not necessarily as well and lost again.

The big difference is that we are now networked. The target MSDOS environment
was not a moving target and had no security considerations. The world is very
different now; we do so much programming in the browser because it's the one
single cross-platform zero-friction environment we have. But those reasons
also make it a battleground between platform monopolists.

There is also so much more software. Part of the problem that Stackoverflow
solves is dealing with this. You can't be an expert on everything, there isn't
enough time and it moves too fast. So you need a quick solution to incidental
problems so you can get back to the "core" problem.

(credentials: the code I wrote at age sixteen for doing 3D rendering
[https://github.com/pjc50/ancient-3d-for-
turboc](https://github.com/pjc50/ancient-3d-for-turboc) )

~~~
bitwize
> browser

> zero-friction environment

Giggle.

~~~
pjc50
If you know another way I can deploy code instantly on everything from PCs to
phones to televisions without even having to sign anything, pay anything, or
get approval, I'm all ears.

------
MrGilbert
I had to giggle recently when I heard "Delphi is dead". It's not. And I don't
think it ever will, because, both as a language and work environment, it is
quite powerful.

It has pretty low entry barriers, and is pretty capable. When I used it (as a
hobbiest, during Delphi 5 and Delphi 7 times), it had a superb tooling, and a
really efficient compiler. Everything "just worked". It's now 15 - 20 years
ago, when we created really tiny Windows exe files. A notepad.exe clone in
only 23kb size - with no external dependencies at all, just using pure
Windows32 API and Delphi. These where truely fun times.

Miss them some times.

~~~
Leace
Totally agreed. I was fortunate enough to start real programming with Delphi 5
(and then 7). Nowadays I know dozens of languages and frameworks but nothing
comes close to the experience of quickly prototyping apps that at the end
looked good, didn't need any dependencies and were super-small.

Another benefit was that it was possible to interoperate with low-level Win32
API and the enormous component library provided by third-party authors.

~~~
MrGilbert
> Another benefit was that it was possible to interoperate with low-level
> Win32 API and the enormous component library provided by third-party
> authors.

Yes, absolutely. I'm happy to see that "Project JEDI" is still around[1].

[1]: [https://github.com/project-jedi](https://github.com/project-jedi)

------
h4l0
I really don't want to sound cynical about this great initiative(!) but it
saddens me that among many open modern languages and tools, they instead opted
for Delphi.

I cannot think of a single positive reason behind this decision in 2020. All I
can think of is that the people that came to this conclusion are the ones who
graduated from Computer Science related studies in ~1998-2004~ and immediately
got themselves in politics. I lost count of how many times have I heard that
if you pay for it, it's just better...

Finally, I admit that I'm definitely highly biassed when it comes to Turkish
Politics.

~~~
Dolores12
All modern tools are really complicated compared to Delphi. I remember Delphi
was so intuitive to design GUI and program its events so i could start making
my own programs right after professor showed me how to make a button and
handle onClick event.

~~~
p2detar
Well, in all fairness, the same can be said about Visual Basic and all the
<inser name here> .NET languages. And I'm not even a Windows programmer.

~~~
barrkel
Delphi does however cross the stack better than VB - with inline assembler
being available, and a pretty decent debugger with integrated disassembler.

------
zwaps
I mean, one may assume incompetence and corruption. And perhaps that's the
case. But on the other hand, teaching languages are not the same as production
languages. There are a number of languages that may be more powerful, but I
think Delphi is a decent choice for teaching.

* You want to teach principles. Delphi allows you to teach OOP principles. You may or may not agree that OOP should be the starting paradigm, but that is at least a popular and conventional opinion.

* You don't want complexity. I am sure there are many alternatives that do things better. Heck, I am sure some Haskell guy will tell us itt how he can build a graphical interface in half a line of code. But remember these are kids who may not even understand what a program even is!

* You want results. In particular, it should be easy to create things like a user interface via the IDE. The fun about learning programming is to create something cool. Kids today most often use UI's and not terminals, and I think there is real value to allowing them to create something they might actually use. If you struggle through understanding your first program, and all it does is to print out "Hello World" on a black interface, it is somewhat underwhelming. But if you can use the IDE to create your custom "hello world" box with pink borders and a unicorn picture - well that's cool!

* Of course you want students to be able to transfer their skills to other languages. But that's arguably not a big issue with Pascal.

* Finally, you want it all in one package. If you have to learn a vast module infrastructure, it just complicates things. Here is your "language", you can do everything in it. I remember when we were learning, we started to try to build games and stuff. We used the tools available to use, because it was all very complex and we understood little. It was useful to have such a limited toolbox in the view of complexity. I think if we were forced to think about modules and many, many options to do a thing, we'd probably give up. Of course it is educational to try to come up with a solution with a limited set of tools!

From this perspective, Delphi is not a bad choice. Indeed I think the only
other similar choice would be C#, which would probably cost more.

~~~
jonathanstrange
I don't think the motivation is teaching-related at all. For teaching there
are way better languages than Object Pascal, which is kind of outdated and has
a lot of anachronisms.

However, Delphi is an outstanding tool for production and together with
Freepascal/Lazarus one of the best options for cross-platform application
development - certainly on a par with C++/Qt. So this is a pretty smart move
of Turkey to get some innovation going, and I expect great new end-user
applications to come from Turkey during the next 10 years.

~~~
badsectoracula
> has a lot of anachronisms

Such as?

~~~
thu2111
It's not garbage collected, but also, not completely manually memory managed
either. I can't quite recall how it works but it's mostly some sort of ref
counting + some manual.

When teaching, non-GCd languages just get in the way. You don't want students
apps to be segfaulting constantly because they're running into memory errors
whilst you're trying to teach them something else. Learn programming and get
confident with it first, THEN learn the techniques needed to safely manage
memory (maybe).

I actually learned programming as a kid with first Turbo Pascal then Delphi.
My programs crashed with the dreaded access violation error all the time.
Debugging that sucked. I assume it's better these days.

~~~
ak39
>>My programs crashed with the dreaded access violation >>error all the time.
Debugging that sucked. I assume >>it's better these days.

How would automatic garbage collection help in a scenario where you are
deliberately accessing an object that you haven't created or have destroyed
already?

~~~
thu2111
Hm, have you used a GCd type safe language before? This is a bit of an odd
question. In modern languages like Java (but unlike Delphi) you can't access
an uncreated object or manually destroy objects, outside of special cases like
file handles.

My point is that there's a lot to learn when you start out programming. Most
developers don't write manually memory managed code anymore so it's a skill
that can be pushed far down the list of things to learn, and trying to learn
it right at the start will just get in the way.

------
phendrenad2
Professional programmers scoff at "old" languages like this, but they forget
what it's like to not know the first thing about programming, or what GCC is,
or how it's different from Clang, or if you need to install Linux to use it,
or if you're making a huge mistake by using C++ instead of Rust, or if maybe
Go is better, or why that one person said something about GraphQL, or if you
need to install a virtual env for your python.

Delphi just installs with a double-click and you can write code in a box and
it runs.

~~~
kragen
> _Professional programmers scoff at "old" languages like this_

Old languages? Delphi is a lot newer than C. C in a mostly modern form dates
from about 1977; Delphi is from 1995.

If you want to just write code in a box and have it run, maybe you should use
[http://sketchpad.cc/](http://sketchpad.cc/) or
[https://jsfiddle.net/](https://jsfiddle.net/). Or code.labstack.com,
intervue.io, codepad, codiva.io, paiza.io, compilr, ideone, onlinegdb,
repl.it, rextester, mycompiler, jsbin, sequential, or the other couple dozen
alternatives in
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_source_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_source_code_playgrounds).
Or ObservableHQ, which is fucking amazing. Or try.jupyter.org. Or just your
browser's JavaScript console. Or ShaderToy, where you can program in GLSL. Or
Philip Guo's [http://PythonTutor.com/](http://PythonTutor.com/) which can step
you through the execution of simple code step by step while visualizing the
stack.

And Python is five years older than Delphi, too. So it's not about disdain for
old languages. Python was originally developed to be easily accessible for
beginners, based on Guido's experience with ABC, which was purely a teaching
language, and for some time Guido's main project was CP4E, Computer
Programming for Everyone. It's moved away from that in the last 15 years or
so, sadly, but some aspects of it still remain.

~~~
blub
Or you could use Delphi, install once, deploy on any platform you want, keep
your sanity and you not have to worry about anything, including WTF codiva,
sequential or leftpad.js are.

~~~
kragen
You seem to be suggesting that cross-compiling a Delphi app for Android is
easier than clicking on a link. As it happens, that is not actually true.

------
vortico
Turkey couldn't take over Delphi, Greece in 1920, so they take over Delphi,
Embarcadero in 2020.

------
FpUser
I use C++/C, Delphi, JS, Python. Also Java, C#, PHP and bunch of other but on
and off basis. Here is my opinion

As a language Delphi/ObjectPascal is anything but ancient. It is kept up to
date and has all the important features one would expect modern language to
have sans garbage collection (well I actually consider this as advantage). It
produces fast native executables without any dependencies. It compiles with
such speed that one can write shell scripts in it. It has the right balance
between a mountain of complex features C++ has and something like Go. Its IDE
is nice as well and full featured. Both language and the IDE exist in paid
version supported by commercial vendor and as an opensource project in case of
Lazarus/FreePascal. Sure there are some problems but show me the language that
does not have any,

In my opinion the only REAL problems with the language/tools are all
political. At some point these products were suffering from bad corporate
governance and on top of that Microsoft went out of its way to actively
destroy market for these in North America and along the way poached all
leading developers from Borland including main language architect.

To make a conclusion I think that ObjectPascal along with the implementation
is a good candidate for being used in many areas as generic well thought out
language along with the IDE.

As for the article: I think it is a good move on Idera's side. To call it
corruption is disingenuous I think. Many corporations are using the same
tactic. It is friggin business.

~~~
zozbot234
> has all the important features one would expect modern language to have sans
> garbage collection

No RAII or ownership tracking, no borrowck, no support for concurrency free of
data races. Huge deal breaker.

~~~
badsectoracula
I know you are trolling, but just in case, you can implement RAII using record
management operators:

[https://wiki.freepascal.org/management_operators](https://wiki.freepascal.org/management_operators)

These are not in Free Pascal 3.0.6 (used in the latest Lazarus release) but
they are in trunk and will be available in Free Pascal 3.2. I think they are
also available in Delphi since a while now.

------
ulucs
Corruption matters aside, I honestly think choosing a non-standard technology
is a good move. Reading the news article, you see that the students mentioned
are in trade schools. Turkey _needs_ the trade school students to continue
doing trades (there's a shortage of tradespeople), so it would make no sense
flooding the javascript/c#/python developer market with trade schoolers now
thinking they might make lots of more money despite not having any training on
software development. We already have enough lemons in the developer market as
it is.

So if they learn Delphi, they can use some software automation to make their
jobs easier, and they can easily learn another language if they turn out to be
really good at this new thing. After learning an OOP language, learning a new
one takes at most a week.

~~~
blub
Honestly, they could maybe start a desktop app start-up.

The web craze hasn't infected the entire planet (yet), and there's many small
companies that require different tools and can't afford the big name packages
or they can't find something matching their requirements.

~~~
netsharc
It's an interesting concept. Flood the market with Delphi programmers, then
companies will accept Delphi solutions, and start asking for them too. But
also the good programmers won't leave the country because outside of Turkey
nobody is asking for Delphi.

------
kdtop
Eternal truths:

* New things are typically more popular than older things.

* People not using ObjectPascal / Delphi love to hate on it.

* People using it feel outraged at the injustice, pointing out it's merits.

I have been using Delphi for about 30 yrs it seems. I have a love / hate
relationship with it. Love the language and the ability to rapidly get the
program I want created. Hate that version after version, the IDE STILL has
stupid bugs; that the built-in help seems to get worse and worse with time (I
don't want a slow web browser showing me Microsoft C calls and all sorts of
irrelevant nonsense), and get very annoyed when having to get required custom
components installed before being able to open a project using the components.
And I REALLY dislike that they charge so bloody much for it. For business
reasons I had to purchase a license that cost a few thousand dollars. Like 2
weeks later, sales people were calling me encouraging me to spend a similar
amount to upgrade to the newest version that had just come out. They must have
only a handful of paying customers and depend on the few to keep their entire
business afloat.

------
zerkten
In the UK during the nineties we had old versions of Delphi distributed on
magazine covers. Magazines then carried numerous tutorials over the years that
helped people get started on their programming careers when school computing
courses had lost their way with a focus on IT. Computing in schools in the UK
with the BBC Micro had been much more useful as a basis for learning
programming, something Eben Upton called out in his Raspberry PI keynote at
PyCon a number of years ago.

I recall discussions with other students in my first year of uni about how
they learned to program real things for family and businesses with these
tools. Native and efficient Win16 and later Win32 (compared to VB runtime)
programs were an exciting proposition in the 90s. Delphi could be used to
create things that weren't as viable with VB. Personally, I chose C++ Builder
for some reason (probably because I had heard about the industry use of C++),
but even it had interesting facets, like the VCL compatibility with the Delphi
toolset.

~~~
tomjen3
That was exactly how I got my start as a programmer, except in Denmark. It is
so hard to understand that today you can download Python, Ruby, Java or
anything else you want for nothing, but back then those where a Big Deal.

------
taneq
I was curious a little while ago whether Delphi or something similar was still
available for modern computers (I think it followed from the same question
about MS Access and VB6).

Turns out there's a free Delphi-compatible IDE called Lazarus:
[https://www.lazarus-ide.org/](https://www.lazarus-ide.org/)

~~~
0-_-0
Has anyone here used Lazarus? It looks great from its description but I'd be
interested in an independent opinion.

~~~
badsectoracula
Yeah i use it for many years. The language is good, not free of warts, but
does the job perfectly fine. The IDE might be a bit confusing at a first
glance, but it is easy to figure out and it is so responsive it puts every
other IDE to shame (consider that it runs and is usable on an original
Raspberry Pi - which AFAIK has the equivalent power of a 300MHz PC). But the
crown is the LCL/FCL (the VCL equivalent) framework with its tight integration
with the IDE and visual designer (which you can use not just for GUI forms,
but for creating actions, non-visual objects, collections, etc though
obviously most of the focus has been on the GUI designer).

Here is a simple tool i wrote in a couple of days in Lazarus:

[http://runtimeterror.com/tools/bugs/](http://runtimeterror.com/tools/bugs/)

Also here are a couple of other applications i've written with it:

[http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/](http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/)

[http://runtimeterror.com/tools/lila/](http://runtimeterror.com/tools/lila/)

I've written some other stuff too, like this graph editor:

[https://i.imgur.com/S2qTuU1.png](https://i.imgur.com/S2qTuU1.png)

or this 3D world editor:

[https://i.imgur.com/s0GaK0A.png](https://i.imgur.com/s0GaK0A.png)

[https://i.imgur.com/316SmAh.png](https://i.imgur.com/316SmAh.png)

or these two tools for creating bump maps and combining meshes to create
textures:

[https://i.imgur.com/RaZQz68.png](https://i.imgur.com/RaZQz68.png)

...but those are run-of-the-mill tools that i haven't available anywhere. Also
i have a bunch of other tools i do not have screenshots of and there might be
some other stuff on the server i do not remember :-P.

------
sitkack
Idera (nee Borland) must be stoked, they potentially just created 1 million
new Delphi programmers in a 2nd world country. I'd add a bullet point to the
sheet.

* One million Turkish kids

This isn't necessarily corruption. And we have no idea what they paid. The
internet is lousy in Turkey, having a stand alone system with documentation,
an IDE and a great debugger will work really well in that environment. Pascal
is a perfectly fine language.

In my universe they started using Racket and The New Turing Omnibus (for
middle school) and then The Little ____ Books [2] and then on to Structure and
Interpretation of Computer Programs [3]

[1] [https://racket-lang.org/](https://racket-lang.org/)

[2]
[http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/books.html](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/books.html)

[3]
[https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html](https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html)
[https://github.com/sarabander/sicp](https://github.com/sarabander/sicp)

~~~
rolleiflex
> The internet is lousy in Turkey

Um, what? I just signed up for fiber in Istanbul, lowest plan, 25mbit, at dirt
cheap $11 a month — unmetered. Meanwhile my San Francisco apartment, Comcast
charges me $67 a month for a 50mbit capped one.

While there is some variance in availability (just like any other country)
Turkish infrastructure is generally first-world. It is for political reasons
that it gets demoted into the second, but ultimately we’re talking about a
place with a $25k~ GDP PPP per person [1]. That’s more than Greece’s, and
climbing towards Italy’s.

[1] [https://tradingeconomics.com/turkey/gdp-per-capita-
ppp](https://tradingeconomics.com/turkey/gdp-per-capita-ppp)

~~~
sitkack
Istanbul isn't the whole country and it is a huge place. The sibling comment
mentions Antalya, another large city. Both are going to have ok internet.
Ergodan has done well to support the rural population where internet service
is lousy. And that is only one aspect of having a self contained system.

Arguing over internet speeds when it comes to choosing a system for kids to
learn programming on was by _far_ weakest argument. I should have just removed
it, as it was a straggler that was going to die anyway.

~~~
cerebellum42
The sibling comment mentioned Anatolia (almost the whole part of Turkey that
is on the asian continent), not Antalya, the city.

------
spaceplane
This has nothing to do with Delphi being education language.

This is how you transfer tax money to your cronies.

~~~
FpUser
And you were the bank teller who wired it right?

------
revanx_
I programmed in Delphi for 8 years, then I switched to FreePascal. Yes, the
grass is greener on the other side, and it's also free.

~~~
non-entity
Going to start a project in in FreePascal soon because it seems to be the only
[not abandonware] compiler for a high level language that still supports
targeting 8086.

~~~
kragen
Huh, I'm surprised to find that you're right, unless you count NASM. Randall
Hyde last updated HLA in 2015 (and it didn't support the 8086 anyway),
WalterBright last updated DMC in 2013, and SDCC doesn't support the 8086. But
I remember the 8086 as being a lot of needless effort that we had to cope with
because it had a large installed base: near, far, and huge pointers, EMS bank
switching, shitty TSRs that would stomp your registers, and so on. MS-DOS made
it worse.

What are you up to? Something like
[https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-
al...](https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-
emulators/) where the needless effort is the whole point?

~~~
non-entity
Yep, my goal is to write a kernel for an old IBM 5155 I picked up a while
back. Mostly for fun

~~~
kragen
Are you familiar with Project Oberon and Liedtke's Eumel?

~~~
non-entity
I'm superficially familiar with Project Oberon, but have not heard of the
latter.

~~~
kragen
What do you think of them?

------
timwaagh
Pascal isn't necessarily the worst choice to learn programming in. After all,
it was designed from the ground up for education and Delphi is one of the few
environments around sporting a vb-style GUI creation interface. In high
school, when i could barely program i still managed to utilize delphi to run
some physics calculations. I suppose Java or C# makes more sense at the
college level. But below that when the vast majority arent going to be
programmers and the goal is to get them an idea of what programming is about i
could think of few superior choices, if any.

------
akinbalcioglu
This is not BUY. It is an agreement to supply the students within the
curricula of 12 different courses for students to apply the projects using
Delphi. It also covers an agreement t provide monthly scholarships to
successful students.

------
ajuc
I still think Object Pascal is a much better language for teaching than C,
C++, or Java.

It's simper, has fewer distracting features but covers all the important
things, doesn't enforce too much boilerplate.

Unfortunately it's undead since like 10 years.

------
oefrha
I too have a soft spot for Object Pascal but

> Getting object-pascal back into universities and education is very
> important. Not just for Delphi as a product and Embarcadero as a company,
> but to ensure that the next generation of software developers are given a
> firm grasp on fundamental programming concepts; concepts that represent the
> building-blocks that all software rests on; a curriculum that has taken
> heavy damage from the adoption of Java and C# in the early 2K’s.

doesn’t sound very convincing. Not a Java fan at all and never used C# since
AFAIK it’s mostly used in the Microsoft ecosystem (I heard very good things
about it though), but what fundamental concepts can’t be taught in a Java & C#
curriculum that can be with Delphi? The article unfortunately doesn’t expand
on that.

~~~
blub
Java and C# are a morass of complexity. There is no job or project where you
just use the language Java/C#, you have to pull their immense libraries and
frameworks in too.

On the other hand Delphi's just Delphi. That's quite refreshing in a world
where everything depends on everything else.

~~~
GordonS
> Java and C# are a morass of complexity. There is no job or project where you
> just use the language Java/C#, you have to pull their immense libraries and
> frameworks in too

I used Delphi for years back in the day, and will always have a soft spot for
it. But your claims here are simply not true - the .NET standard library is
_huge_ , and you can get a lot done without any other packages.

------
anticodon
Students will be taught a language they'll never ever use in real life. It was
paid for although there're tons of free languages for every platform and every
paradigm.

I guess someone from the government had just become significantly richer.

~~~
drbojingle
If the government bought into Delphi then dev jobs within the country will
likely be in Delphi more and more as time goes on. They don't need to do what
we're doing. There's more than one way to skin a cat.

------
yolobey
Everyone is assuming incompetence/familiarity with old tooling but it's also
likely that this is a corruption/kickback scheme with some local distributor

~~~
marcocantu
To my knowledge, the software was provided for free, there was no economic
transaction. In fact, Delphi Community Edition is free to any student over the
world. This deal adds support for teachers.

------
aortega
Object Pascal is a great language, with many modern features and very
optimized. Delphi add to this the best WYSIWYG ide ever created.

But they could have used free pascal and save millions, though. This looks
like your usual government corruption. At least this time they bought
something useful.

------
trimboffle
I have a soft spot for Delphi but this is odd.

Delphi has seen its day. Any number of other languages can be taught for
free... python is probably a more relevant choice.

~~~
aortega
> python is probably a more relevant choice.

Python doesn't have any standard graphical IDE or even GUI widgets. No modern
language can create GUI applications with the ease of use of Delphi, except
maybe .NET (which is based on Delphi).

~~~
pjc50
.NET is definitely the easiest possible way to do a widget UI, but it's not
based on Delphi in any meaningful sense. Its closest ancestor is Java, via the
short lived "J++"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B)

(Android later did basically the same thing with Dalvik)

~~~
elteto
I think the parent comment meant "philosophically" based on Delphi since
Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of C#, was also the creator of Turbo Pascal and
chief architect of Delphi. He left Borland for Microsoft in the mid-90s.

------
gabrielbauman
I wonder why they didn't just use Lazarus. Open source Delphi.

[https://www.lazarus-ide.org/](https://www.lazarus-ide.org/)

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zelly
Smart.

While everyone is trampling over each other to get into the tiny little door
(the SaaS/FAANG/npm/golang/frontend/iOS scene), they found the smaller side
door that no one else is taking.

Delphi is good for ordinary line-of-business software, all the boring back
office software that people take for granted in first world countries.

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decafbad
It's an introduction to computers and programming course, for everybody in
technical and vocational high schools.

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Koshkin
Lucky Turkish students... If only someone adapted The Structure and
Interpretation of Computer Programs for Pascal.

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jacknews
Is it a good teaching language? I admit ignorance, so this does make me want
to find out more.

I think more obvious options would be something like python for it's
practicality, and something like clojure for elegance and more advanced
programming concepts.

And they're free. I hope this isn't a case of graft.

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znt
Python & Java and .Net has quite a bit of traction in Turkish software
industry. I believe Delphi is mainly used in healthcare but has been losing
market share for years.

I think this is just another money embezzlement scheme by Turkish official,
which shouldn't be that surprising unfortunately.

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fiatjaf
I expected to see people complaining that a government spend tons of money
buying licenses when there are hundreds of other languages that you can use
for free out there, but instead I saw people saying Delphi is good, Delphi is
bad, Pascal whatever.

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johtela
Delphi _is_ ancient - as am I. My first FOSS published in Internet was written
Delphi in 1996:

[http://delphi.icm.edu.pl/authors/a0000824.htm](http://delphi.icm.edu.pl/authors/a0000824.htm)

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rafaelvasco
Started programming 14 years ago with Turbo Pascal. It was amazing. Good days.
I remember having so much fun coding a command line application, full of
blinking colors, colored text and stuff. Always have been a graphics inclined
programmer.

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kovach
Mods please change the title to remove "buys", the article changed it's title
to "Turkish ministry of education secures free access to Delphi for an
estimated one million students".

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looper_dude
Honest question: if the goal is to teach true OOP, why not teach Smalltalk?

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gdm85
I see it as a valid learning tool, a modern alternative to a Basic variant,
however later on I would complete the curriculum with something with a bigger
market penetration.

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gaspoweredcat
i have no idea why delphi still seems so popular in the middle east, a large
number of mobile phone tools are still coded in delphi but ive never really
understood why

~~~
nottorp
Before everything came with an UI builder, there was only Visual Basic (before
dot niet) and Delphi for building UIs quickly. But with VB you needed to
switch to C++ for low level functionality, while with Delphi you could just do
it in the same project. Including inline assembly.

Those days are gone, but the legacy still remains.

For this deal though, I guess Embarcadero is desperately looking for something
that looks like a sale. All the cool kids in the west have switched to shit
web UIs and they're probably left only with a few legacy customers.

Edit: Yes, the deal is most likely bribery. Doesn't make Embarcadero less
desperate. Their fault for going enterprise and pricing Delphi out of a
hobbyist's reach.

Edit 2: Sheesh, cheapest Delphi license is 1699 eur... back before Borland
(sorry, Inprise) got sold i think it started at 300...

Edit 3: It's still much cheaper than Qt at 5500/year. This is how great
platforms die.

~~~
badsectoracula
> Sheesh, cheapest Delphi license is 1699 eur... back before Borland (sorry,
> Inprise) got sold i think it started at 300...

The cheapest version actually started at $99 and that was up to Delphi 5 IIRC.
Later versions bumped the price to $199 (and i think there was a $99 for non-
commercial use) and then quickly ascended to thousands.

I think it was after Delphi 5 that they also renamed themselves to Inprise.

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Havoc
You can do worse than Delphi for learning purposes.

Would probably have picked something with a bit more job market potential
though

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Zenst
How many RPi's could they of brought instead.

Heck, country that size and government backing at that scale could of thought
- lets build a Turkish home made computer of rpi levels.

Reading this I just can't feel like an opportunity missed.

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jhoechtl
They should have gone with Go. It's also Wirthian in spirit and is likely to
get you a job.

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Aperocky
What a waste.

Studying software programming does not start with buying licenses.

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egorfine
What's wrong with dBase, FoxPro and Clipper for that matter?

~~~
GrumpyNl
Clipper brings back memories, compiling took around 35 minutes, that was time
to play some pool.

~~~
tluyben2
Really? The Nantucket one? I remember it, perhaps in error, as quite fast in
compilation and I did write a couple of ERP systems in it back in the day.

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Nullabillity
Next up: COBOL?

~~~
walkingolof
There is nothing wrong Delphi, other than it's largely a niche language

~~~
vallode
But as educational tooling is that not a fault in itself? Surely we should be
preparing students to at least use some mainstream languages, rather than
pouring their skills and time into something that has a niche market value?

~~~
Leace
IMO this is a limited view on what students need to learn to be valuable on
the market. Delphi teaches you the value of experimentation through small
feedback loops. For novices that just start programming this is critically
important.

~~~
vallode
Absolutely, I don't entirely know what would be the best thing for students.
In the end students should be taught to disrupt the industries they join not
propel mainstream practices. So there is something to teaching them with more
niche languages, that help them think differently to what is currently on the
market! Thanks for sharing.

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utf_8x
This is just sad

