Thursday, April 17, 2025

Grumpy Old Developer Yells At Clouds Part 2

There's an old Yiddish joke that most of us are familiar with:

 A man came to a tailor, and asked to buy a new suit. The tailor brought it to him, As he stood before the mirror, he noticed the vest was a little uneven at the bottom.   “Oh,” said the tailor, “don’t worry about that Just hold the shorter end down with your left hand and no one will ever notice.”

  While the customer proceeded to do this, he noticed that the lapel of the jacket curled up instead of lying flat. “Oh that?” said the tailor. “That’s nothing. Just turn your head a little and hold it down with your chin.”  The customer complied, and as he did, he noticed that the inseam of the pants was a little short and he felt that the rise was a bit too tight. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” said the tailor. “Just pull the inseam down with your right hand, and everything will be perfect” The customer agreed and purchased the suit.

The next day he wore his new suit with all the accompanying hand and chin “alterations.” As he limped through the park with his chin holding down his lapel, one hand tugging at the vest, the other hand grasping his crotch, two old men stopped playing checkers to watch him stagger by.   “Oh, I say!” said the first man. “Look at that poor crippled man!”   The second man reflected for a moment, then murmured, “Oh, yes, it looks like he is in a lot of pain, but I wonder, where did he get that wonderful suit?"

This is a situation we are all familiar with in various areas of life.  A new car, which we hope would be an upgrade from our previous beater. Or our long-serving decades old IDE, Delphi, and its language, compiler, debugger, and tools.

 Trying to demonstrate Delphi 12 in 2025 to a new user on a high-DPI system with the current woes of the form designer and its basically broken modes for high DPI design is absolutely  such a case. We must wave our hands and say "don't worry this will get better in the next version, or the next".  Next year in Jerusalem, as they say.   But don't count on it.

 Trying to install Delphi with its various unstable patches and re-releases and inline attempts to fix things which ship broken feels similarly bad.   Trying to use the compiler when it has decided that it's time for you to spend a day chasing random failures and AVRs in the compiler.  Trying to connect the IDE to a modern version of MariaDB/MySQL. Trying to fix problems with deployment of Android binaries, or to figure out what is wrong when a BPL won't load, or is destabilizing your IDE,  these are all feelings which take away from the ability to do the job the tool was meant to do, and like the suit, can result in one feeling rather immobilized, and unable to do much of anything at all.  Trying to use GetIt on days when GetIt has decided it doesn't want to "Get It".   Every time we turn on Error Insight and think, this time will be different, and it isn't.  The code completion engine sucking up 80 percent of your CPU or all your memory again, the newly rebuilt one that was built to fix the CPU and memory bloat of the previous one, but which is more bloated and slow than the thing it replaced.  The dark theme still not drawing itself properly and making basic features of the IDE not work like the Edit and Find/Replace features, or the Project Options dialog causing an Access Violation every second time you open it.   The other users of this product who are absolutely convinced that I must be "holding it wrong".   Because they don't see any of these problems, these problems do not exist.  Maybe that, the inability to notice the bit rot, as it accumulates, is the thing that dismays me most.

 It's really a sad fate for what was once a notably powerful and useful product.

 

3 comments:

  1. An excellently stated piece. I hope you don't lose your MVP status over it.

    It seems to me that Delphi feels like the stereotypical open source software of old... held together by too few developers, poorly documented, lots of open issues and "it works on my machine" claims.

    I alternately wonder if the problem is people who keep paying their upgrade fee no matter what, or if that's the only thing keeping it from disappearing entirely. Do they just not care, or is the revenue from the product now so low Idera/Embarcadero devote very little resources to it anymore and the few developers assigned to it are doing the absolute best they can?

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  2. I can't lose my MVP status as I resigned from the MVP program in protest over the layoff of the Scotts Valley team, which was composed of people that I briefly worked with when I worked at Embarcadero around 2011, on a now-defunct project that was not in the developer tools division.

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    1. I recently blogged about Embacadero using gig platforms to hire. Several developers have spent years working on those gig-work platforms. Will you be using Flutter or Swift? I've heard success stories.
      https://delphinightmares.substack.com/p/embarcaderos-alumni-aka-mvp

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