Opinions on KYLIX 3 (Delphi 4 Linux)

[windozbloz]

Bye Bye Billy Bob...

I'm back with one more question, then I'll chill. I have scoured the news
and net for info about Borlands KYLIX 3 and have found little technical
info about it. Their screen shots are very impressive, similar to Visual
Basic. I have sent several emails to Borlands Sales and Pre-Sales
departments. Pre-Sales bounces and Sales won't answer. I'm sitting here
with money in hand ready to buy but not from a company that won't give me
the time of day.

Does anyone of you have experiance with KYLIX 3 and do you think I should
consider buying it? Thank You, I'll go oil my keyboard now.

Doug

--
LINUX protects me from the GATES of hell !!!

[Jeff Epler]

I honestly don't know why anyone would spend money for a development
environment, no matter how fancy. I don't know why anyone would develop
software in a language that doesn't have at least one open
implementation.

It's a great way to get screwed when Borland goes under or decides
they only want to sell a new, incompatible product. What do you do with
your existing product when that happens? Re-train on a new platform,
and re-write from scratch?

Just say no to proprietary software.

Jeff

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[windozbloz]

Jeff Epler wrote:

I honestly don't know why anyone would spend money for a development
environment, no matter how fancy. I don't knowdefinitelye would develop
software in a language that doesn't have at least one open
implementation.

It's a great way to get screwed when Borland goes under or decides
they only want to sell a new, incompatible product. What do you do with
your existing product when that happens? Re-train on a new platform,
and re-write from scratch?

Just say no to proprietary software.

Jeff

Thanks Jeff,
Point taken! I had given that considerable thought. Your words 'retrain on
a new platform' struck a loud cord with me, thank you, I will definitely
reconsider. I don't ever want to find myself locked behind 'the GATES of
hell' again!

Doug
--
LINUX protects me from the GATES of hell !!!

[Thomas Bartkus]

"windozbloz " <ne******@veriz on.net> wrote in message
news:gJQCe.8759 $2h1.1968@trndd c05...

Bye Bye Billy Bob...

I'm back with one more question, then I'll chill. I have scoured the news
and net for info about Borlands KYLIX 3 and have found little technical
info about it. Their screen shots are very impressive, similar to Visual
Basic. I have sent several emails to Borlands Sales and Pre-Sales
departments. Pre-Sales bounces and Sales won't answer. I'm sitting here
with money in hand ready to buy but not from a company that won't give me
the time of day.

Does anyone of you have experiance with KYLIX 3 and do you think I should
consider buying it? Thank You, I'll go oil my keyboard now.

Good question! Wither Borland?

My impression (second hand - based on no direct experience with Kylix!) is
that Borlands wonderful Delphi product ported to Linux has been a
dissapointment.

* * * Someone with real experience on Kylix - please jump in here!

Calling Delphi "similar to Visual Basic" is hurtful because I believe that
VB is the product of looting and pillaging the talent that came out of
Borland. I'm guessing that Microsoft has successfully targeted this
perceived competitor with destruction.

If Kylix were of the quality of Delphi, it would be a killer Linux app.
Thomas Bartkus

[Thomas Bartkus]

> Jeff Epler wrote:

I honestly don't know why anyone would spend money for a development
environment, no matter how fancy. I don't knowdefinitelye would develop
software in a language that doesn't have at least one open
implementation.
It's called (ROI) Return On Investment. If you can get that to a positive
number, then spending money on the tool is a no brainer. Given that one
caveat, a sane person will just do it!

If I can create something that earns $10,000 or more in profit, then the
difference between a tool that costs $500 and one that is free amounts to
small beer. IOW - it hardly matters! The only decision one needs be
concerned with is which tool is most effective.
It's a great way to get screwed when Borland goes under or decides
they only want to sell a new, incompatible product. What do you do with
your existing product when that happens?
Your existing products are not affected. The compiler tools you have will
work just as well as the day you bought it. Your ownership of the product
does not get revoked just because Borland dissapears.
Re-train on a new platform,
and re-write from scratch?

What do you do when an open source project you were using gets abandoned?
Hard to see much difference here.
Thomas Bartkus

[Caleb Hattingh]

Hi Doug

Not only was Kylix a letdown, there is talk also of it being
discontinued. To be fair though, it is easy to see the difficulty for
Borland to deploy a Linux IDE of the same quality as Delphi when so much
in different Linux distributions is variable, the widget set being a prime
example: CLX just never caught on, amongst the myriad of more mature and
more open toolsets.

I am assuming that you have experience with pascal, or ObjectPascal as the
Delphi manuals call it (if not, why Kylix?). If so, may I suggest you
look into
a) fpc (Free Pascal Compiler, http://www.freepascal.org)
b) Lazarus (An fpc IDE, aims to be an open-source Delphi clone, supports
multiple widget sets [Win32 native on Windows!], can't remember the URL)

Though python is probably my favourite language for general purpose
hacking, there is a lot to be said for a native compiled language
(sometimes speed _is_ an issue), and in particular there is a lot to be
said for fpc:
- Something like 99% Turbo Pascal compliant
- Very nearly Delphi compliant (object-pascal)
- (IMHO) Much cleaner language than C, still natively compiled
- Supports operator overloading & inlining
- Can be used to develop python extensions
- Supports nearly effortless cross-compiling

There are some problems with Lazarus at the moment, here is the biggie:
It creates binaries of around 5MB for a minimal app, and this is because,
at the moment it seems like it compiles the component library into the
executable. This is somewhat of a problem for me but I expect this will
change within a release or two.

Lazarus is _very_ much like Delphi, and works on Windows, Linux, and
possibly several other platforms.

cya
Caleb

and net for info about Borlands KYLIX 3 and have found little technical
info about it. Their screen shots are very impressive, similar to Visual
Basic. I have sent several emails to Borlands Sales and Pre-Sales
departments. Pre-Sales bounces and Sales won't answer. I'm sitting here
with money in hand ready to buy but not from a company that won't give me
the time of day.

Does anyone of you have experiance with KYLIX 3 and do you think I should
consider buying it? Thank You, I'll go oil my keyboard now.

Doug

[Luis M. Gonzalez]

I'd suggest you take another path:
Since we're in a python mailing list, I assume you like python, so
instead of Kylix (or Object Pascal), you could try Boo
(boo.codehaus.o rg) .
Boo is not python, but it is very similar.
It could be described as a statically typed version of python for the
..NET framework (it also works in Linux with Mono and in Mac Osx).
It has borrowed from python as much syntax as possible and uses a handy
type inference system, which allows you to code without having to
declare types everywhere, making it very similar to a dynamic language
while being static.
As I said, "it is not python" (Peter Hansen, please don't jump to my
jugular...), but it's been inspired and takes a lot from it. In words
of Guido Van Rossum, it is 95% python.
You get all the niceties you got used to enjoy in python, such as list
comprehensions, generator expressions, slicing, dictionaries, lists,
etc, etc.. and you get all the speed and performance of a static
language for free.
As for IDEs, you can use SharpDevelop in Windows (free) or MonoDevelop
in Linux (free).

And if you are patient, soon you'll be able o use regular python in
..NET and Mono, and I'm sure that there will be support for SharpDevelop
and MonoDevelop for it as well.
At the present time, python for .NET (code named Ironpython) is still
at pre-alpha state (version 0.7.6).

[Mike Meyer]

"Thomas Bartkus" <th***********@ comcast.net> writes:

> Re-train on a new platform,
> and re-write from scratch?

What do you do when an open source project you were using gets abandoned?

cvs import -m "sources for orphaned project" <myprojectnam e> <productname> <initial>
Hard to see much difference here.

Doing support for object-only distributions is *much* harder than
doing it for source distributions.

I have a habit of picking products based on technical superiority, not
popularity. As a result, I have a nice collection of orphans. That's
because technical quality has little or nothing to do with
profitability.

On the other hand, since starting to use open source projects, I've
never had one I depend on fail. I've had some I contributed to fail,
but that's a different thing.

I suspect that technical quality in open source projects contributes
to their attracting people to support them. This makes them ever so
much more attractive than proprietary solutions, where technical
quality seems to be irrelevant to longevity.

<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mw*@mired.or g> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.

[Thomas Bartkus]

On Mon, 18 Jul 2005 19:56:24 -0400, Mike Meyer wrote:

"Thomas Bartkus" <th***********@ comcast.net> writes:

> Re-train on a new platform,
> and re-write from scratch?
What do you do when an open source project you were using gets
abandoned?

cvs import -m "sources for orphaned project" <myprojectnam e>
<productname> <initial>

Hard to see much difference here.

Doing support for object-only distributions is *much* harder than doing
it for source distributions.

I have a habit of picking products based on technical superiority, not
popularity. As a result, I have a nice collection of orphans. That's
because technical quality has little or nothing to do with
profitability.

On the other hand, since starting to use open source projects, I've
never had one I depend on fail. I've had some I contributed to fail, but
that's a different thing.

I didn't suggest that orphaned open source projects were a problem. I
simply point out that they are no more, nor less, of a problem than an
orphaned (and paid for!) commercial product.
I suspect that technical quality in open source projects contributes to
their attracting people to support them.
Perhaps. And there is no way to support a commercial product other than
by becoming an employee.
This makes them ever so
much more attractive than proprietary solutions, where technical quality
seems to be irrelevant to longevity.

This last statement sounds too much like a canard. It is difficult to deny
that commercial products either put some significant value on the table or
go bust. Although people can be, and sometimes are, swindled few can
afford to simply throw their money away. IOW - technical quality is
*never* irrelivant to longevity. And one must also consider that
technical merit, by itself, is rarely sufficient. The open source world
is awash with much that is high on technical merit but commercially
unviable. There is much out there that one would gladly pay good $ for if
only for lack of that last (but most difficult!) 5% effort that would
bring many of these projects to fruition.

Which brings me back to the point that the difference between free and
$500 (or $1000!) amounts to virtually *nothing* when evaluating a tool.

You use what is most effective to get the job done.
Thomas Bartkus

[Luis M. Gonzalez]

Luis M. Gonzalez wrote:

As I said, "it is not python" (Peter Hansen, please don't jump to my
jugular...)

Hey Pete, I was joking on that one!
Here's the missing smiley ;-)