How is it that blog posts like the one below from Matt Asay on c|net’s News.com can become a top headline on Techmeme? Is this sort of headline grabbing BS to be expected now that CBS owns c|net? 

I’m not going to do it justice by linking to it so if you want to you’ll have to search. I believe this story and headline were written for no other reason than to generate traffic for c|net. Mr.Asay is clearly out-of-touch with the Windows software development world if he actually believes the data he’s referring to. Couple that with the fact that companies like CodeGear and tools like Delphi can go a long ways towards alleviating the pain of moving to a new version of Windows by changing their runtime frameworks to help either adopt or mask the differences between versions allowing developers to continue to focus on the task at hand.

Fortunately, a number of comments in reply to the post are appropriately taking him to task. Of course, the downside of all this is that it accomplishes c|net’s goal of driving traffic to their site.

I’m not sure of the selection criteria for Techmeme but it just took a step down in my book.

If you’ve been following my blog recently perhaps you’re aware of activity related to a post I wrote back in September asking for a free version of the Delphi command line compiler. In a response to a comment asking if I’d ever tried the Free Pascal compiler I stated:

I haven’t tried the Free Pascal compiler for a number of reasons including the fact that it’s RTL/FCL violate Borland/CodeGear’s copyright. I’ve looked at the code closely and IMO copyright issues abound.

At that time, there were a few replies but over the last few days members of the Free Pascal core team as well as the FP community attacked me personally over this statement. Upon request I published one example illustrating my point using Classes.ExtractStrings. Unfortunately, this was met by further attacks until a comment from Marco van de Voort and subsequent email apology from Daniël Mantione, both members of the core Free Pascal team. The following republished with Daniël’s permission:

from: daniel.mantione@freepascal.org
to:strefethen@<deleted>
date:13 Nov 2007 15:25:14 -0800
subject:Weblog Mail from 'Dani&#235;l Mantione' on 'Steve Trefethen’s Weblog'

Hello Steve,

I would like to offer apologies on behalf of the Free Pascal development team for the aggressive comments on your weblog. The situation puzzles us; that code you showed is more similar than one would expect with an independend implementation, yet it doesn’t look like being taken from Delphi source. Michael, who comitted it, cannot remember having written it so it might have been contributed by someone, but searches through e-mail archives haven’t revealed anything yet.

Anyway, it’s good that this is on the agenda now. Copyrights are something we have to be carefull about.

Best regards,

Daniël Mantione

In further support my statements I added five additional examples all from classes.pp which covers roughly 16% of that file, which is not exactly a "fringe file". I’ll add that this more recent review took but a few minutes and is by no mean extensive nor exhaustive unlike a review I did earlier this year. Daniël has since provided me plausible explanations as to how these issues might have arisen and indicated that the core team is reviewing sysutils.pp and classes.pp.

Unfortunately, this is neither a new issue nor limited to sysutils.pp and classes.pp. I’m disappointed that seemingly no one from the Free Pascal team or community discovered nor, to my knowledge, raised these issues years ago.

And, fwiw, I haven’t been employed by Borland since June 28, 2007 nor, as was implied in a comment, do I have any financial interest in the company whatsoever.

Of course, this raises the issue of how do you go about validating the originality of Open Source source code in general? And no, I don’t have a good answer.

Blake Watson has written a very good review of Delphi 2007 on DevSource which is worth the read. The review is fair and balanced and it's hard not to like the conclusion:

But if you're still clinging to Delphi 7, it's time to let go. Seriously.

There is, however, one part that needs a clarification and that's:

If you're familiar with Borland Developer Studio 2006, this is analagous to the feature called “Delphi for Microsoft Win 32”. That's important because the IDE is still .NET-based, even though it doesn't target .NET.

That's not correct. The Delphi Win32 IDE is not ".NET based", not even close. In the Win32 IDE there are a small number of features, mainly related to code parsing like refactoring, implemented using .NET but the post I wrote back in November 2004 is still accurate today. In case you're wondering that post may look a bit odd only because it was moved from the old Borland blog server and the comments were preserved by appending them to the post.

So, rest assured the IDE is very much written in Delphi Win32 using the Win32 compiler/RTL/VCL that ships with the product. If you still have doubts there have been plenty of people who have removed the .NET dependency from the IDE which you simply couldn't do if the IDE were truly ".NET based".

Ok, now that I got that out of my head I can go enjoy my weekend. You have a good weekend too!

Raymond Chen posted this entry about not playing mind games with your users when it comes to presenting dialogs where they have to make a decision. Well, I just ran into the Windows Vista Copy File dialog which popped up when I attempted to drag a file into a zip folder which already contained a file of the same name:

This totally threw me off, while everything on the dialog is grammatically correct the logic is completely backwards from what I expected. Here's why:

NOTE: For this screenshot I placed the mouse over the "Copy and Replace" option so it would appear highlighted since there was no other visual indication of what actually should be clicked.

• The title says "There is already a file with the same name in this location" but the first location mentioned is the source location not the destination. Why isn't the title "The destination already contains a file with the same name."?
• The directions say "Click the file you want to keep", but the filenames are the same it's the paths which are slightly different but that's not what's highlighted.
• The "Copy and Replace" option mentions the file that's being copied not the one I'm about to replace. Why doesn't it say the opposite and tell me loud and clear "Here is the file you are about to replace:"
• The "Don't Copy" option doesn't mention the file that won't be copied but rather the file that won't be replaced.
• I felt overwhelmed with too much file detail information like "Size" and "Date modified" for both files, which is the same btw, and could have been provided via a details/dropdown next to each filename.
  
• Why is there a "Cancel" button? How is it different than "Don't Copy" given that there is no explanation about what it's not going to do.
• The subtitle says "Click the file you want to keep". What does that mean for the file I don't click?
  

This dialog seems far more concerned about the Source file not the Destination which is about to be overwritten.

The only guess I can come up with as to how Microsoft ended up here would be something along the lines of The Windows Shutdown crapfest.

[Updated: March 15] Added one more case

The other day DavidI asked "What should we call the language of Delphi 2007 for Win32" and my answer is unequivocally: Object Pascal. I've worked on the Delphi team since well before Delphi 1.0 shipped and I've never considered the language to be anything but Object Pascal. Several years ago there were some shenanigans about changing the language name from Object Pascal to Delphi and I'm not really sure how that even came about but it left me scratching my head nonetheless.

Back in 1995, Borland made a video called "Speed Is" and if you have BDS 2006 it installed you'll find it in the CoolStuff demo directory under your BDS\4.0 tree. It's a mashup of quick video sequences of things that represent "speed" and while I don't necessarily think it's a great video it conveys the message that "Delphi is Speed" and perhaps more importantly it's a concept.

From Dictionary.com:

con·cept /ˈkɒnsɛpt/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[kon-sept] –noun

1.	a general notion or idea; conception.

2.	an idea of something formed by mentally combining all its characteristics or particulars; a construct.

And for me that means:

• Fast code/compile/run/debug cylces
• Rich framework(s)
• Visual designers
• Small fast executables
• Blazing compile times
• High productivity

To say it's "just a language" borders on insulting and I think completely misses the point.

So there you have it, my $0.02 on the subject.