As I continue to learn and work with Delphi, I am finding it to be quite an enjoyable language to program in. Sure, those begin-end blocks with the wordy labels for where they begin and end are a little harder to read than braces would be. But there’s also some little niceties, like single character delimiters for inline comments, that are not the same delimiters you would use to comment out a large block of code temporarily. There are certainly disadvantages to using such an old version of the language/IDE, I dearly miss “find references”, which would be super-useful considering I didn’t write most of the code and have to spend much time discovering how it works. Having struct equivalents, and super-flexible sorted string lists that can be just lists or maps or…(TStringList, THashedStringList)
I also like the UI for editing the GUI fairly well, the stretch to fill client area option and setting the anchor points seems a lot more intuitive to me than some of the Java layout managers/UI editors. I like the power and flexibility that Delphi is so closely related to the C++ language of families that you can use certain C++isms (eg: String pointers) when you need them, but pretend they don’t exist the rest of the time. And being able to use functions from the Windows API makes me feel a little bit at home from my C++ programming days.
Overall, this has been a really fun project to work on, even with the not knowing the language well handicap (yes, there has been LOTS of Googling. Especially since Barnes & Noble didn’t have ANY Delphi related programming books in stock. Maybe next time I’m in the Bay Area I could acquire a printed book or two?