Delphi the Underdog

A number of years back (5 or 6), I asked for and received Delphi 5.0 for Christmas (we can argue over the absolute geekiness of this later). It was the professional edition - one step up from Standard, one step down from Enterprise. I was pretty excited about it - I wrote a couple neat little applications with it and then it pretty much died for me. Like Visual Basic which I also used a lot in high school, Delphi got replaced with Perl, Java, C and PHP! I lost touch with Windows and started living a Unix life. It was good.

For those who are unaware, Delphi is a Rapid Application Development package that essentially consists of a development environment in which to create windowed applications and the like. Delphi is also know as Object Pascal because it is essentially the language Pascal tweaked for Object Orientation. Pascal is an unusual language that was used a lot in the past by mathematicians. It is really only unusal in comparison with most popular C-based languages like PHP, perl, Java, etc. In any case, this was what I am talking about when I say Delphi.

Then along came Graphic (CSCI 4160) and I have to create a graphics package. Well… I toyed with a few ideas and then late on the night before the first assignment was due, I installed Kylix on my Linux box (anna). Kylix is essentially a Delphi environment built for Linux. And using a TPaintBox (which encapsulates the TCanvas class) I was able to get something working in a short amount of time. Basically this whole post is designed to show mike that he can take his Java and well… I’ll let you imagine the rest. Thanks and long live Delphi. And Macs.