Now, who would be the best Delphi programmer?

Would that be Obama, or would it be McCain? I think Nader, as an independent, would be the best choice.

Ok, so I’ve got to make this a more interesting posting. Here goes one attempt.

If you would go for McCain, you’ve got an oldy with a lot of experience (much like myself I might add). You would probably get an excellent programmer, but not going beyond the possibilities of the VCL. He would stick to the VCL, maybe buy a component pack or two, but the single EXE would be his target. He’s heard of webservices and code injection, but doesn’t really know what it means. He just manages to get a setup program out (of course using Installshield, not writing something himself). The freakiest thing he does, is implement skinning using DevExpress.

Now, when you look at Obama, he probably would write his own VCL components from scratch. While programming he would have a couple of visions in sight. The client should be satisfied, but maybe the components are good enough to sell later on to another client. He’d keep his eyes open to other platforms all the time, but would stick to Delphi as his primary development tool. Unless, there is some major upset. Then, after careful deliberation, he would drop Delphi. The first attempt will be with a couple of softening arguments, but when there is another upset, it’s out with the tool all together. The end result would be a set of well designed components, all working together on various levels. Of course, one component can crash, but that’s all part of the development strategy. The one that crashes, is out of the door and the next one can be developed.

And Nader? Well, of course he would stick to using Smalltalk. All very well designed, but commercially not very viable.

So, go for it. Where do I go wrong? Make my day!

Bye,
Bart

(just a day off, as you probably can tell :-)

Passion for Research

I’ve been blogging about the Microsoft PDC the last week and, although it strictly didn’t have anything to do with the Delphi community, I still think it is interesting to know what happened there. I will do one last summing up tomorrow on the event, but there was one presentation I would like to highlight.

I attended the talk on the WorldWideTelescope Research project. I had installed the software earlier and was really amazed at its quality. At the presentation I found out that it basically was a one man project by a guy named Jonathan Fay. I didn’t know that before and my respect goes out to that guy. I regard myself as a pretty good programmer, but what he has come up with is out of my league. So, respect to you Jonathan.

You can watch the presentation at http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC48/. And, if you think of killing the video after a couple of minutes of watching, at least skip through to about 27 minutes and watch him talk about a presentation by a 6 year old kid, all done with his software. The passion that Jonathan shows after that really sums it up. That moment made this presentation the highlight of the conference to me.

Bye,

Bart