Why C# coders should shut up about Delphi

EDIT : Some 3 years after this satire post was published, a website called “.NetRocks” decided to make a number out of it. The satire clearly went over their heads, and the facts I outline in the post was met with ridicule. I’m a bit disappointed with .NetRocks, because this could have been a great opportunity for them to learn more about modern object-pascal development and it’s ecosystems. They seem genuinely baffled that Delphi and Object-Pascal in general was being used in 2016 (and 2019), and their behavior and response demonstrates the very arrogance and ignorance we have come to expect from “brogrammers” of their type.

I must admit that I’m somewhat shocked that a massive show like .NetRocks is utterly ignorant of the fact that Object-Pascal as a language has millions of users around the world. You have compilers like Oxygene from RemObjects that targets .Net, Java, x86, ARM and WebAssembly. So their whole podcast on “how to port Delphi applications to C#” is absurd, because that’s not how you migrate code from Delphi to .Net. The Elements ecosystem, which covers C#, Pascal, Java, Swift and GoLang installs straight into Visual Studio and adds Object-Pascal to the environment. You can also convert source-code between Pascal and C# through automation. Manually going about such tasks is amateurish to say the least, but I honestly didn’t expect much when they open their podcast with verbal abuse.

Another point .NetRocks seem to have missed, is that Delphi has been aggressively optimized since Embarcadero took over from Borland. In 2016 Object Pascal ranked as #14 [2.164 score] on the Tiobi index over most popular programming languages [globally], just nine points below C#. So the most cost effective way of getting your legacy Delphi application modernized, is to just buy Elements from RemObjects, or upgrade your Delphi version to this century.

If they had bothered to check they would also have learned that I manage some 16+ developer groups on social media, with roughly 50.000 developers in total. I have also worked for Embarcadero that makes Delphi, so my statements while whimsical and satirical, were based on facts. I work with Fortune 500 companies in the US, as well as large companies around Europe, that all rely on Object-Pascal for their daily operations. Heck, even the Walt Disney company wanted to get rid of .Net in favour of Object Pascal in 2018. Turns out JIT is a disaster when coding against hardware interrupts and “old school” automation. Who could have guessed? (that was satire btw).

On the whole, It’s alarming that the guys at .NetRocks seem clueless to the tools professional developers use for specialized work. Porting a Delphi codebase by hand its, well, amateurish at best. They might as well do a podcast on how to use ms-paint to create art, because Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator is not what people use (that was satire btw).

I am also pleased however, because .NetRocks unwittingly demonstrated my point to perfection Instead of learning more about Anders Hejlsberg’s journey and life before he joined Microsoft, how the .Net class hierarchy is heavily influenced by the Delphi VCL framework, or how the concepts that ended up as .Net were in fact prototyped and experimented with earlier — they jumped straight to ridicule. Of a satire post (lol!).

You can click here for my full reply . And seriously, how it’s possible to mistake this old post as anything but heavy satire is beyond me. But I am thankful to .NetRocks for demonstrating my point. I could not have asked for a better example of arrogance and ignorance Rock on!

Those that follow my blog or know me personally – also know that I don’t go out of my way to be confrontational or disrespectful. I try my best to follow the middle-path, to see positive in all things. But sometimes you face a level of stupid that begs a response. A verbal one. And this is one of those cases.

Lately I see more and more Delphi developers getting into debates with C# developers, and they are confronted with an attitude and belief-system that quite frankly is utter nonsense. It’s not based on history or facts but disputes rooted in childish “isms”. A mix of old habits and an unhealthy obsession with the notion that new means better .

It is nothing short of an intellectual emergency.

Old is bad?

If that is the case then C/C++ should be utter shit, because C is 3 years older than Pascal. Pascal was created to replace C and get away from (amongst other things) the absurd and time-consuming header file practice, not to mention the recursive hell that still occur when headers reference other headers and conditional symbols pile up.

Do you know how curly brackets became popular? Jump into your nearest Tardis and set the destination to the mid 1960’s. Back when mainframes were the size of Portugal and 1024 bytes of memory was the bomb. You see, back then memory was sparse and pretty much all the languages (or toolkits) needed to save space. So the { } curly’s were used as tokens for words like “begin” and “end”. Why? Because one ascii byte is less than five ascii bytes. Every byte counts when you only have a few Kb of memory.

Ps: when I use the word toolkit here I really mean a random soup of asm snippets on a loom. The bones collected to make C was actually a mix of homebrew toolkits made by different engineering teams at the time. And each of these toolkits had their own fanclub /slash/ legal representation; because all of them, miraculously, had invented the exact same thing at the same time before everyone else . These guys kept on fighting over who owned what well into the Watcom era . It’s probably the longest standing demonstration of a grown-up tantrum since the roman emperor caligula outlawed clothing.

Fast forward to 1970 and the amount of memory on mainframes had already doubled a few times just like Moore had predicted five years earlier. The C standard that Dennis Ritchie had painstakingly wrangled from the cold, greedy hands of grumpy old technicians was due for an upgrade. Tests were done by very dull, very serious men in grey clothing – and in their horror they discovered that human beings would interact with words and phrases faster than symbols and glyphs. So a word like “begin” would be picked up by the brain faster than {. It is just knockout stuff isn’t it.

You cannot praise Anders as a genius architect and at the same time throw his life work in the thrash. Perhaps you should ask yourself why Anders loved object pascal so much that he dedicated half his career making sure universities had access to it.

Enter Niklaus Wirth , a man so clever and academic that he doesn’t catch exceptions; He is the exception. But next to his colleagues over at Berkley our dear Niklaus is the proverbial rock-star. He decided that in order to make programming more accessible for students, easier to learn and above all, establishing a standard for safer code, that they should take science to heart and include that in a programming language design. So he put on his gravest lab coat and began to implement “a better C” where he applied the research that words are picked up by the brain faster than tokens and symbols. Nine months later pascal was born, and to celebrate Niklaus used colored socks that day. A risky bit of business that could have cost him his seat at the strangely brown sorority club, in which he was master of ceremonies. But hey, Nikolaus is a rebel and this was the swinging 70’s after all.

My point? This is why pascal uses “begin” and “end” as opposed to { and }. It’s one of the many aspects of the Pascal language that makes it so easy to master.

Whimsical satire aside: with the knowledge that C is actually older than pascal , not to mention that it is identical in features, depth and complexity to Pascal– what is it going to be? Do you still cling to the notion that older have to be of less value than new? Or could it in fact be that you haven’t really looked closer at object pascal to begin with? Have you even installed a modern version of Delphi and given it a worthy test drive? Or do you just speak out based on what you like and know, as opposed to what you don’t know and haven’t even tried.

My 8-year-old daughter is like that. She makes up her mind about food before she has even tasted it. Surely a trained engineer can do better?

And I say that because — if we follow your line of reasoning, C/C++ should be incapable of producing C#. How can something old and outdated possibly produce something new and exciting? You do know that C# is written in C and assembler right? And that Java and all the other high level languages out there didn’t spontaneously self assemble. They are all written in C, assembler or pascal. And there is a reason for that .

Just like nature have different levels, from particles to minerals, from minerals to bacteria, from bacteria to plants, from plants to insects (and so on) — so does a computer. Each of these levels have laws and principles that govern them, and no matter how much you want to introduce something from a higher level into a lower level – that’s just not how reality works.

The law is very simple: each level can only emit complexity upwards. So assembler is used to produce C and pascal, C and pascal is used to produce C++ and object pascal, C++ and object pascal is used to bring about every other single piece of tech you take for granted.

So when you criticize Delphi but use C#, you are just underlying that you dont really understand the difference between archetypical languages and context based languages.

It’s like saying Visual Basic 5 is cooler than assembler . You don’t debate with people like that, you just look at them with pity. I don’t know how many years a software engineering  degree is elsewhere, but if you just spent 3 years in college and 2 years at a university followed by one or two additional years getting your diploma – and this is the level of insight you graduate with then I pity you. And I pity your employer because sooner or later you will bring about the apocalypse.

If we apply rational logical thought to the proposition at hand, we cannot but conclude that the notion of “new is always better” is false. It is to mistake marketing for facts and capitalism for science. The fundamental principles of computing wont change because you favour a high-level programming language. The C/C++ embedded market wont magically roll over, because C# is a mitigated disaster on embedded devices. And I speak from experience, not preference.

Your teacher should have taught you this: “ In a computer, like nature, the past is always alive “. Look closely at your brand new PC or Mac: Bios, Vesa screen modes, non linear memory, hardware interrupt vectors and a cpu that supports no less than 3 instruction sets. You have layer on layer of increasing complexity (a.k.a “the past is still there”). Why not call up Linus Torvalds and ask him why he’s not using C# in his line of work; or NVidia why their GPU pipeline only ships with C headers and not C# classes. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that call.

The only C# compiler worth using, is actually RemObjects C# (the Elements compiler). Because unlike mono or ms’s compilers, Elements builds proper binaries on the same level as C/C++ and Pascal. You can actually write kernel modules with Elements if you like, something you cant do with Mono or Visual Studio. Heck, .net services still require a service host on Windows.

C# is better than Delphi?

Actually, it’s not. What today is known as .net, from its CIL intermediate language right down to the global assembly cache is pretty much Delphi with a new syntax parser on top . Yes you read that correctly the entire .net product family is  practically Delphi refactored . The whole bytecode regime was one of the last skunkwork projects Anders worked on, and was actually described on Borland’s news-servers years before it magically re-appeared as Microsoft’s flagship product.

Anders Hejlsberg created and prototyped these technologies (as did many other companies, since Java made bytecodes cool) while he was working at Borland. And indeed, the father of C# and entire dot net stack is none other than the father of Delphi .

At Borland (in the borland.language newsfeed I vividly remember) these technologies went mentioned under the codename “ portable Delphi” . I followed the thread on the news servers for quite some time. It was no secret that Borland was tinkering away on the next big thing, and I believe it was ultimately Borland’s response to Java. Because at the time Java had eaten quite a chunk of Borlands educational seat licenses. And had Anders continued working for Borland, Delphi and C++ builder would perhaps be bytecode based today.

Factoid: The first project Anders was assigned to when he joined Microsoft, was J#. Microsoft’s attempt at hijacking the Java language. Microsoft lost the legal battle and was forced to pivot. The end result would be C#.

So when you, the C# fanboy, propose that Delphi is somehow inferior to dot net, or that object pascal is outdated and technically behind C# you quite frankly have no clue what you are talking about. Is it generics? We have that. Is a rich and powerful RTTI? Got that covered. Anonymous procedures? Its there too. In fact, the whole misunderstanding here stems from the fact that C# developers generally think “Delphi 7” is what Delphi is all about. Which is the same that saying that .Net  is what came out in version 1. Who the hell uses Delphi 7 in our day and age.

But just to make this crystal clear: Anders Hejlsberg is not just the father of C# and dot net: he is also the father of Delphi . And before that he gave birth to  Turbo Pascal . In fact, Anders have 3 (if not four) Pascal development systems behind him before he came to Microsoft.

Borland, land of the free

Borland, the company Anders worked for, was put out to pasture by Microsoft. Bill Gates launched a financial onslaught that few companies on the planet could have endured. The reason was that Microsoft really had the worst developer tools on the market (Visual Basic and Visual C++), while Borland represented the very best. So for a long time Borland utterly demolished Microsoft when it came to software development.

When Borland later began to flirt with Linux ( Delphi Kylix ) it must have made the R&D department at Microsoft piss themselves. Delphi is responsible for thousands of desktop applications synonymous with Windows – and if Linux users got their hands on RAD tools like Delphi, with thousands of applications ready to be ported over? Do the math. You have to remember that this was before cloud computing. Microsoft didn’t have a fallback strategy and depended on desktop and server sales. Linux could do everything Windows could, but it lacked the desktop applications, the user friendliness and features Borland made simple.

What Microsoft did was, basically, to buy out Anders (they also picked up a huge part of Borlands R&D department) from Borland and at the same time attack the company from every angle. Drowning them in bullshit lawsuits, patent claims and all the nasty, cowardly practices Microsoft was into back then (we all remember Netscape and how that went).

Bill Gates called Anders up personally and gave him “ an offer I could not refuse “. Whatever that means.

So to put this myth to bed and be done with it: C# as a language and dot net as a technology did not originate with Microsoft. It has Borland written all over it and its architecture is intimately joined at the hip with Delphi and C++ builder. Companies like Microsoft dont innovate any more, they buy competence and re-brands it as their own.

Dot Net framework, you mean the VCL?

If that is not enough, take a long, hard look at how the .net framework is organized. Pay special attention to the features and methods of the base-classes and RTTI. What you are looking at is the VCL, the visual component library, Delphi and C++ builder’s run time library .

If you know Delphi and it’s RTL intimately as well as C#, you quickly recognize the architecture. The syntax might be different, but the organization and names are all too familiar.

There was never any secret where this came from, but it’s not advertised either so I don’t blame people for not recognizing it. But when people start to behave nasty over what should be either a passionate hobby or a professional discipline, then truth must be told. The very foundation of the dot net framework is taken straight out of the VCL.

And why shouldn’t it? The whole platform was whispered about under the codename “portable Delphi” to begin with, it was even designed by the same author – so why should it come as a surprise that it’s basically Delphi reincarnated with a different syntax parser? Either way a few bells should start ringing in your head – telling you that you may have been wrong about Delphi and object pascal in general. Probably because you know very little about Delphi to begin with.

So, what you perhaps believe sets C# apart from Delphi, what you imagine gives dot net an advantage over Delphi – is in reality the opposite: it is Delphi . It originated in Delphi, was inspired by Delphi and flows straight from the inventor of Delphi himself. Anders is responsible for two distinct object pascal development platforms prior to working for Microsoft. Take some time to reflect on that.

You cannot praise Anders as a genius architect and at the same time throw his life work in the thrash. Perhaps you should ask yourself why Anders loved object pascal so much that he dedicated half his career making sure universities had access to it.

Strength in diversity

The fact that C/C++ is alive and well today serves to prove my point: age has no meaning when dealing with fundamental technology. These languages embody the fundamental principles of computing. They don’t grow old because they represent a fundamental level that can never be replaced. There is now law that says C must be there, what persists is ultimately the features that C brings – spanning from assembly to the desktop. Those same features can be found only in one other language, namely Pascal.

Things are the way they are for a reason. And programmers before you established standards that address things you might not have to deal with, but that’s because they dealt with it before you. Just because you don’t see the plumbing doesn’t mean it’s not there.

These are the compilers responsible for the foundation on which all other languages, operating-systems, applications and services rest. Remove those, and the whole house of cards come crashing down.

So C/C++ and object pascal continue to exist, thrive even, precisely because they interface with the hardware itself, not a virtual machine or bytecode format. Delphi as a product is naturally tailored for operating-systems, as is C/C++. But that is because we use programming languages to create applications. There is nothing in the way of someone using compilers like freepascal and writing an operative system from scratch.

By contrast, C#, Java and Visual Basic are context dependent languages . They exist purely in context with an operative system or run-time environment. They can’t exist without these and lack the depth C and pascal brings to the table. The depth to span many levels, from the lowest all the way up to cloud and domain driven programming.

Just look at Android, an operative system written in Java right? Well that’s not really true. The Android operative system depends on a native bootstrap, a piece of code that establishes the run-time environment for Java applications. So when you fire up your Android phone, tablet or set-top box, the first thing to boot is a loading mechanism written in vanilla C. This in turn mounts a filesystem and continues to loads in bunch of native drivers. Drivers for the display, storage, wi-fi and all the hardware components that ultimately make up your SoC (system on a chip).

Its only after this long process that the environment is capable of hosting the Java virtual machine. Then and only then is the device capable of executing Java. This is why languages like Java is called context-based, because they run in context with an established system.

So Java, which for the past decade or more have bombarded us with advertising like “platform independence” is a total flop! Its like communism and looks good on paper, but once you start testing these ideas in real life – they just don’t work.

Turned out that the java virtual machine when running on small devices like phones and tablets, choked the CPU. Which in turn used more electricity to keep up, which in turn rendered the battery life of these devices null and void. Talk about irony. All that hype and Java couldn’t even deliver its most basic promise: platform independence . And you removed C and pascal from our universities for this? It’s a disaster en-par with the burning of the great library of Alexandria.

There is more than a drop of ego and arrogance in this material. Young people especially like to believe they are smarter than those who lived before them. It’s a very selfish idea that really need to be addressed. Take someone like Alan Turing for example, the inventor of what we call computers today. This man assembled and created the first computer by hand. He even hand carved the wheels that made the mechanism run (which was mechanical during the second world war). I would happily bet $1000 that Alan could out program the lot of us had he gotten the chance. He has been dead for many years, but to imagine yourself smarter or more capable than him would be the definition of arrogance.

PS: This is where we come into the realm of wisdom versus knowledge. The difference may be subtle, but it’s so important to distinguish between them.

Either way without the native context to support it Java turned out to be a blundering behemoth. And its the exact same with C#. This is why Miguel de Icaza work on Mono has been so instrumental to the success of dot net and C# in particular. It was Miguel and his team that pushed C# into native compilation versus JIT for mobile devices. C# would never have been allowed on IOS or Android otherwise.

So that is the difference between archetypical languages and context based languages . Hopefully you now see why this negative attitude towards Delphi and object pascal doesn’t make sense. It really is just as stupid as these cults that believe in dinosaurs and that human beings once lived side by side with a T-rex. Anyone with a highschool diploma should instinctively know better.

The problem is when people in great enough numbers start to believe in this nonsense, because then they can actually damage important mechanisms of our eco-system. Insane beliefs really is dangerous both socially and technically.

Grow up!

I have no problem using C# and consider it a valuable tool in my toolbox. Same with Delphi. But when it comes to kick-ass desktop applications for Windows and OS X, Delphi has no rival. It gives you a productive edge that I havent found in any other language. And I don’t base that on preference. I base that on engineering and the years of development invested in Delphi by both Borland and Embarcadero.

I just find it odd that C# developers seem to lack the ability to speak well about Delphi, because it’s a tell-tell sign of immaturity to be incapable of that. Object pascal and C++ is identical in every way (except multiple inheritance, which even C++ programmers shun like the plague so no loss there). Why then should educated programmers find it reasonable to praise C but thrash pascal? It’s like saying that one car is faster than another – but when you pop the hood they have the same engine. The exact same machine code generator even.  It is psychological masturbation. We are coders, we shouldnt do things like that. We should examine the system carefully and then make up our minds.

And what is a programming language anyway? It is the ability to describe the solution to a problem. The ability to define and control how a series of activities execute. Each language represents a methodology for solving problems . A mindset. Nothing more.

Languages like C, C++ and object pascal will always exist, they will always thrive, because they are instrumental to everything else (desktop, operative system, services, everything that makes a computer capable of what it does). It doesn’t mean that Delphi is the solution to all problems, far from it. And that is ok.

Context based languages are more often than not designed for a purpose. Java was initially designed as a network language. This makes Java infinitely more suitable for dealing with that line of work. You can do the exact same in C but you would have to add a few libraries and establish a platform. Which is exactly what C and pascal is good at, implementing fundamental technology. Object pascal is a language you would use when creating other languages. C is more popular for virtual machine development, no doubt there, but there is nothing in C/C++ that you wont find in object pascal.

Interestingly, languages that many believe is long since extinct, like Cobol, are actually alive. Cobol was created to deal with large stacks of numbers and to push associated data through formulas. That is its context and no other language is better suited for the banking sector than Cobol. Which incidentally is the one place where Cobol is used to this day. And why not? Why waste millions trying to hammer in a nail with a hacksaw? Why not use a language especially designed for that purpose? SQL is likewise a language especially tailored for its tasks. I don’t hear anyone bitching about how old and outdated that is. It wont grow old because it embodies the principle of relational data.

And just what exactly is old about Delphi? Generics? Posix support? Weak and strong references? Garbage collection? Attributes? class, record and enum helpers? Dependency injection? Model view controller frameworks? The ability to write assembler side by side with pascal? The ability to link with C/C++ objects? Cross compilation for Windows, OS X and mobile platforms? What manner of logic are you using where you praise other languages for these features, but for Delphi the same features makes it old? Stop repeating what someone once told you like a mindless parrot and investigate. You are an engineer, a field of science; start acting like one.

In my work I use several languages: JavaScript, Delphi, Smart Pascal, Mono C# and even Python. I have also fallen in love with LUA believe it or not.

For web-pages I prefer Smart pascal which compiles to JavaScript (node.js is fantastic). Then you have shell scripting, a touch of x86 assembly code, a dash of bash on my Linux box and .. well, there is strength in diversity.

It all depends on what is best for the customer and what language yields the most robust solution. Sometimes C# is better suited for my clients infrastructure, other times Delphi makes more sense. But if I was to pick a single language to cover all of them, it would either be object pascal or C++ (gcc). These really have no rivals and will never go away.

These are the compilers responsible for the foundation on which all other languages, operating-systems, applications and services rest. Remove those, and the whole house of cards come crashing down.

So using many languages is actually an enriching experience. It brings more depth to our way of thinking and (consequently) affect the quality of our products.

Anyways, I believe congratulations are in order, because if your favorite language is C#, you have in fact been using Delphi without knowing it . There is so much Delphi in C# and they both originate from the same author. So why not pay a visit to C#’s older brother?

So go download Delphi, Lazarus and Remobjects Oxygene – enjoy the decades of research and excellence these dialects represent. It won’t hurt you, it will probably do you a great deal of good.