Delphi & Pascal September 20th, 2006

I heard about it a long time ago. Some of my university friends learned it in high school. When I was in high school and I used computer only for writing letters or stories, the computer course offered pascal programming course. When I learned programming in university, I still didn’t want to bother my self to learn pascal. I have many things that I must learn. The university used C programming language to teach me algorithm and data structures. Then I get fascinated by Linux. Linux combined with university made me busy.

Time goes by. Sometimes I have time, enough to learn pascal. But why do I want to learn something ancient enough like pascal when there are many cool programming languages like ruby (Ruby on Rails), java, python, c#, etc. So I skip pascal.

Then in this semester (my last semester in university), I have to learn Delphi (IDE and programming language) in neuro computing subject. Delphi is based on object pascal which based on pascal. Okay, then, I learned pascal. I downloaded the ebook from here. I read it like novel. Then I downloaded essential delphi ebook from the same website. I read it again like novel. I skip the part that make me confuse. Ok, I manage to make a simple application (matrix multiplier) using this.

So what effect that Delphi give me to my programming career? Almost none. It just add my programming reference and experince. The main reason is I am moving to web programming. Ruby on Rails is my primary choise. Delphi is mainly about desktop application in Windows platform. I admit it that Delphi is a wonderful IDE. The build process is very fast. But if I want to make a desktop application, no doubt I will not choose this. The reason is a little bit political. I use Linux as my operating system. So I choose Java with Swing or Python with GTK+. Some will say Java and Python are slow. If speed make an issue, I choose C++ with GTK+ or Qt. There is not much tutorial about Object Pascal in internet. Documentation make an issue for me.

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