I had a dream…

I had a dream.

While I was working on my current project the WOMP (White Owl Mail Provider) dropped a message at my doorstep. The message reads

You are invited to a special event. Be prepared to be picked up at 7 pm.

Point seven o’clock a coach drawn by two unicorns came up the driveway (I never knew we actually had one) and stopped at the front door. A beautiful young woman in a tight business costume stepped out, smiled at me and said: Hi, I am the Countess of Lovelace, but please call me Ada. Come in – we don’t want to be late, do we?

There are moments where you don’t have to be asked twice, so I entered the coach and took place next to Ada. While the coach started and took off the ground Ada turned to me and said: Excuse me, I have to announce our arrival. She tapped at her right earring, her eyes turned absent for a moment, concentrating on something. Then her smile took over her face again and she answered my puzzled look pointing to her ears: Mind controlled. A present from Steve.

After a few minutes the coach approached to land in front of a huge building made from the finest Carrara marble. We left the coach and walked through the front door which was guarded by two long haired geeks fiercely typing at their keyboards.

After passing the hallway which was covered with screens showing Hello World in different programming languages, we entered the hall already filled with about 256 people standing around small tables chatting. As soon as we reached an empty table Marco Cantù entered the stage and started talking Italian. Although my Italian is normally just sufficient to order a decent menu, I had no problems to understand his talk. Marco showed us the new Delphi XE6 which focuses more on quality and performance than on new features:  All of the bugs from QC are fixed now! Whenever new bugs or annoyances are found they will be addressed with a hotfix as soon as possible. We know that a stable, working environment with less features is more valuable than a bunch of buzz words implemented in a half-baked manner. (translated from Italian, obviously)

There was a tremendous applause from the crowd. You could hear people shouting: Cool! Waiting for that for so long! I will update my Delphi 7 immediately! Where can I drop my money? Long live Delphi, the best programming language in the world!

While everyone was so excited, Ada took my hand and led me outside to the front door. There still was our coach, but next to it stood a black sedan. A man clad in a black cloak approached us and offered me to come with him. Still holding my hand Ada said: What I just showed you is the future how it should be. This man will show you the future that might be. Be aware: as soon as you enter that car, you will forget everything you have just seen before.

Well, as I write about that dream, there is no doubt about my decision. I am quite able to imagine the future that might be, so are a lot of other people around. Nevertheless, I would love to see the future happen that should be.

Going to fresh up my Italian now – just in case…

Author: Uwe Raabe

Addicted to Pascal/Delphi since the late 70's

15 thoughts on “I had a dream…”

  1. I know many Delphi developers share this dream. (BTW, very nice way of putting it).

    Maybe I can learn German, though…. All the best

    -Marco

     

     

     

  3. I don’t think having a bug free environment is going to sway anyone that still uses Delphi 7. But it might help convincing new users to try out the language and environment.

     

  5. qc: if they would fix bugs fast, these bugs wouldnt appear again and again for every new version

    and the qc would  to not a tenth part of its current size.

    But this would supersede all the nice jobs handling with these bugs and refusing to

    acept the confirmability.

    And there seems to be some jobs handling this.

     

    How to solve:

    add to the qc better complaint possibilities so that complaints get to a supervising level and

    cant be blocked by the qc-editing agent

  6. I wish you’d dreamt that Marco was talking about XE5.5. That really would have been a good dream. But I would certainly settle for XE6 being like that.

  7. I too, once had a dream.  Unfortunately, it was a nightmare.

    In my case, the wizard promised Andoroid…soon, as part of the IDE and at a nominal cost.

    The gobblins proclaimed: “XE2! Firemonkey!  An unbelievable new toy …err tool. “We’re gonna’ update

    often.”   I believed.   I believed.  I heard a raven squak, “Beware!”

    I awakened soon and found new software on my hard drive and later discovered my
    credit card was debited severely.

    I loaded my premier application.  Error messages everywhere.  Oh yah, unicode.
    Told it was no problem.   Hmmm.   Guess they did not test it with a string intensive
    application like mine.  A year later, I got all the unicode to actually work, actually
    pretty good.  Programmed mostly with my mostly stable 2007 until I got it right.

    The updates?  Kinda of happened.  Firemonkey got updated several times; the
    updates were not via dlls or anything simple as promised and updates were almost all to the crippled

    Firemonkey.  Got XE2 for the Styles,
    submitted QA..a few accepted; most said I was an idiot cause not reproducible here.

    My application now looks pretty after writing numerous work-arounds for Styles failures and
    discover Android is still a dream..unless I pay an additional fee equivalent to the upgrade
    fee.

    I understand now the cost of fairy dust has increased and promises made in a dream are not meant
    to be kept.

    I had another dream last night.  A raven told me: “Nevermore.”   This morning I decided “Android Studio”.”
    It looks terrible and is clunky, but not much worse than the original Fire Monkey.  I am hopeful, if I could

    figure
    out ANSI to Unicode, I can figure out Java.   I used to program in assembler, C, C++ until I got spoiled.
    For the moment XE2 works almost fine with my work-arounds.   In a year or two, I might be confident to

    try coding Android with Delphi; after the community finds out whether it is a dream or a nightmare.

     

    Thank you Uwe for the fairy tale.

  9. Next wave should be about web development, rich GUI.

    UniGUI, Raudus style
    or different approach like XForms
    or  a web framework like Spoon
    or Google Native Client could be OK.

    Or we could use Delphi dialect scripting language (types, classes, objects, methods of Delphi)
    instead of JavaScript.

    But it should be a “ground shaker” product…

  10. It’s a lovely dream, but you can tell it’s a fantasy… Unicorns don’t exist, if Steve (Jobs??) could give you Ada, you wouldn’t be seeing people using keyboards, and EMBT will NEVER close all QC items. 

    A more realistic dream is that EMBT started listening to it’s customer base and addressing QC items in steady, transparent, fashion (in keeping with CANI and the Compound Effect).  That would be a lovely and achievable dream…

    Sadly, things seem to be more about money than ideology and vision.

  12. It is a nice dream, but only a dream.  They would have to reboot the OSX port litterally from scratch.

    Don’t believe me?  Read the source code.

    Follow the hacks and kludges.

    And as for FireMonkey.  Hey, good luck with that.  Maybe their third attempt at a cross platform framework will be the charm.

     

  14. “… and you woke up from your dream to find yourself next to to David I!”

    Those aren’t pillows! :-p

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