[Mono-osx] Delphi Prism and all those Cocoa bridges

[Matt Emson]

Andrew Brehm wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 2:31 PM, marc hoffman <mh at elitedev.com> wrote:
>   
>> we're also supporting Monobjc, as well. The IDE support is there in the
>> November release, but we don't ship a template yet because this stuff got
>> done too shortly before RTM for us to support it officially (but that was
>> three months ago, and it has proven solid).
>>     
>
> Very good.
>
> I find Delphi more convincing every time I read about it! Ever since
> the .NET Rocks podcast episode about Prism I was sort of hooked.
Speaking as someone who did Delphi for about 10 years professionally 
(programming and I did a stint as a trainer too), I can say Object 
Pascal is a very nice language. There are probably 2 features I miss 
from Object Pascal - real Sets (ooooh, sets!!) and being allowed to use 
and Delphi Enumerations - especially using enumerated types as the index 
bounds of an array. Maybe there's one or two other minor things, but 
those two I miss regularly in C#.

Having said that, Delphi is pretty much a dead end in my world these 
days. I'm not clear why Delphi Prism is any better than the Win32 
language - I remember Chrome/Whatever it was renamed, on which the Prism 
compiler is based, updated the language syntax. But Borland didn't 
support that, so it was all a bit pointless if you wanted to share code 
between Win32 and .Net via that route. Borland also did have their own 
,Net compiler for the Object Pascal language, except it generated 
horrible oddly Win32 specific code IIRC. I lost interest by the Delphi 
2005 release, so it might have improved, but I'm not really sure to be 
honest.. Delphi Prism isn't going to open many doors to jobs in 
traditional Delphi, because the language syntax has changed both subtly 
and extensively in different ways to the core Borland product. The 
question is - are there Prism jobs out here? I have no idea. I have no 
axe to grind though, so your experience might be entirely different. I 
guess I see Delphi as a step back now, after using C# for 4+ years. I 
actually avoided .Net and C# for the longest time - with some weird 
notion that I was a dedicated "Delphi programmer", but the switch is 
like night and day. I don't think I could go back.

I'm sure Mark won't take offence if I also say, using a VM to run Visual 
Studio and then running Interface Builder on the Mac is a complete and 
total kludge. A MonoDevelop version would really improve the situation, 
so let's hope that happens :-)