| Martijn Lievaart 2006-05-20, 5:48 pm |
| On Thu, 18 May 2006 23:41:20 +0000, John Navas wrote:
> That's not entirely true. Turbo Pascal (Borland) was an early hit that
> greatly contributed to the success of the IBM PC. But for the Microsoft
> juggernaut it might well have continued to be an important factor.
Borland killed itself. Their C and C++ compilers were good. Pascal evolved
into Delphi, which at the time maybe was the best language around. But
Borland made a few crucial mistakes.
- They almost gave their products away, but then charged steep prices for
support[1], at the time that Microsoft was improving their developers
support.
- Delphi, and later TurboC++[2] shipped with horrible GUI libraries. Good
to develop a quick and dirty program, but you didn't want to try to
develop something more complicated in it[3][4].
- Later libraries were arguably better, but completely nonintuitive. While
MS made sure some good books came to the market[5], Borland resources were
pretty scarce.
Then Borland changed to Inprise and that really killed of the company for
good.
M4
[1] I once was asked to pay Fl 10.000 ($ 4500) for a fix for a known bug.
Exit Borland at our site.
[2] Or whatever the name du jour was at that time
[3] F.i: at that time databases supported one blob per table. Having a
coupled table per additional blob led to really horryfing code. You
essentially had to reprogram the whole forms logic yourself.
[4] Grids had drag-'n-drop functionality. Only it was f*cking unusable.
You had to program everything yourself to get anything serious done.
[5] Although programming Windows (every version) was litterally riddled
with bugs[6], and other books weren't much better, you had something to
get you started.
[6] F.i. the whole chapter on memorymanagement in the 3.1 version was
completely wrong, from start to finish.
--
Redundancy is a great way to introduce more single points of failure.
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