Re: Pure Lazyness

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Re: Pure Lazyness
by Richard Dale on Monday 20/Sep/2004, @16:28

"I've always felt that Delphi was much more closely related to Modula3 (which is related to Pascal, which is related to pseudocode for programming which is arguably related to Algol)."

If you read up on James Gosling's background you'll find he didn't have any object oriented programming experience before designing java and imposing it on the rest of us. He implemented a uscd-p system pascal compiler system on dec vax to solve some problem he had in the early 80's I believe, and just used that idea in conjunction with knowing the C++ had big problems, to invent java.

I feel Anders Hejlsberg (Delphi/C# designer) has more intellectual horsepower than Gosling, and certainly would have known about Modular-3 when implementing Delphi. Even so, when I attended a Delphi introduction presentation in 1996 or so, I can only remember feeling utterly underwhelmed. I was a fulltime NeXTStep programmer used to the dynamic runtime of Objective-C, and just couldn't understand why a warmed over Object Pascal would appeal to anyone..

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Re: Pure Lazyness
by D on Tuesday 21/Sep/2004, @18:12

As opposed to a warmed over Object C? Smalltalkers on the other hand wonder what glue you've both been sniffing.

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Re: Pure Lazyness
by Richard Dale on Tuesday 21/Sep/2004, @18:53

Yes, java doesn't seem to have been influenced by Smalltalk because maybe James Gosling didn't know anything much about it. Which is a shame - he wouldn't have come up with static methods instead of proper class methods with dynamic despatch. And classes would have been objects that you send a 'new' message to create an instance. That design error has been carried through to C# - I really don't like static methods.

"Resist the urge to overuse static methods.":

http://www.ftponline.com/javapro/2004_09/magazine/columns/proshop/

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Re: Pure Lazyness
by Evan "JabberWokky" E. on Thursday 23/Sep/2004, @12:44

I have a feeling much of the reason is due to Borland's wide set of users that used TurboPascal and ilk to write real apps. Much like a C programmer moves to C derived languages easily, Delphi was easy for somebody used to Borland's Pascal offerings.

Incidently, Objective-C was specifically the reason I kept referring to "C derived languages". I'd love to use it, but haven't had a project that was appropriate. Other than a few single file programs one step beyond "Hello World", I haven't played with it. Most of my time these days is spent with PHP and enforcing proper coding practices on developers with bad habits.

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