Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Fan Mail: Religious Delphi Programming

Your reviewer got some nice emails about religion and programming.

Notably, this is a hate site, or that your reviewer is not right with God, your reviewer writes hate, lies, etc.

False Witness
DelphiHater could never understand about false witness in the Delphi community, such as, false advertising, in the sense you sell something, but you give something else instead.

For example, is Delphi itself, almost every year, a new version of Delphi, and more and more upgrade fees to follow. Nearly every new version has some kind of weird or strange issue which makes it nearly difficult to use, be it some memory-leak, bug, or bad implementation. Ditto for the libraries and add-ons which come with it.

Suppose for instance, you take programming out of the context and then, tell someone, he needs to pay US$800 per person to "sign-up" for the professional plan, or US$2400 for the expert plan and US$4000 for the "super-deluxe" plan to join a "gentleman's club".

Obviously, you would need to first sign-yourself-up first, and then sign-up others. Then you get involved in all kinds of activities to promote your end-results. A bit later, you make your end-result, but the results are not-so-good, and need to be better. Then, there are plenty of add-on packages you need to buy to make the end-result better, but wait, some of the add-on packages are not-so-good, have problems, and almost all of them costs money. Months pass by, and you are still making the product, bills needs to get paid.

The trouble starts when end-results are bad, or the customer is not happy. There are plenty of quick-fix solutions, sold by many vendors. Suppose you buy a package for US$300 for 5 people, it would be US$1500.00 and then, every new person who needs to help you finish your task, you would have to pay costs too. If you are an employer, you need to decide which library to license and which not to license, and for employee, use what is given.

Notice that for the library vendors and Borland, what "other" business do they have other than outside this business? What good is it to have buy custom buttons, labels, custom check-boxes, skins (the type to make your programs beautiful, not fur), code to access database, code to print reports. Each of them costs money, and each of them comes with no-compete license (you cannot make anything similar to the vendor) and upgrades, subscriptions to follow after.

[The non-compete license means that if you buy a report-writer, you cannot use make your own implementation, since that would be a license violation.]

Did you notice there are plenty of Outlook bars, Outlook scheduler-library, but few Outlook replacements? Did you notice there are plenty of Ribbons, but few final results? Of what quality are those Ribbons and Outlook bars?


Betrayal
It's very often that fellow Delphi developers back-stab each other. Your reviewer was played out many times by other Delphi developers, and no surprises here. It is more evident in the Delphi world because of close-knit community.


Stealing...
Your reviewer wonders the karma of using stolen goods?

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