Delphi was far superior than all other languages of the time, it had all the necessary bullet points to become what is Java now.
Borland really failed on the marketing and sales side, while providing the best tech, they completely missed the importance of having a strong sales team capable of scaling the language inside corporates, which were the driving force back in the days.
I have a lot of good memories of Borland Delphi 4.0 and 5.0 on Windows 95 and later 98/2000.
I was never a Borland guy because I didn’t know pascal or c++ when they were big. But I (believe) I’ve heard stories that Microsoft was especially aggressive about poaching their talent. Things like pulling up in a limo with not-insignificant amounts of actual cash to lure them away. At least I think it was Borland. All’s fair in love & war I suppose, but it does feel dirty, lol.
Anyway, it’s hard to execute when your best and brightest keep jumping ship to the competition.
Please let me know if it was not Borland, because this is a good anecdote.
He got a technical fellow title, the money, and the company that enabled him to make all the good things in the future. He would have never made any of that if he stayed with Borland.
> had all the necessary bullet points to become what is Java now
The language itself was hacked together in a haphazard way. It didn't even have a formal grammar which I found out because it stopped us from creating some pretty important tooling for it.
Edit: I think there was a commercial company that offered a parser, which they created by tweaking a grammar until it got a high enough pass rate on megabytes of publicly available Delphi code.
I am somewhat confused about this product. I think the Function as a Service approach has really some good advantages on more classic approaches sometimes, but if I want to go that path, what is the advantage to actually use an open source product and maintain the server with all the maintenance required (security updates, platform updates, handling scale, etc...)?
Wouldn't be an out of the box solution provided by AWL Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, etc... a better and more straightforward option on this space?
I am just wondering if I am the only one with this opinion, what is your experience on this topic?
Freedom to deploy anywhere is quite important to some people. One can truly appreciate it only after gets burned by one of these "cloud" provides(i.e. Google appengine/cloud).
A "Swiss Startup" is a startup actually based in Switzerland.
As far as I know, foreigners with permanent residence in Switzerland have the same rights of Swiss people, plus more than 25% of population is actual foreigner in Switzerland, so that should not a problem at all.
> Although it is nice to have more funds available, which increases the competition among VCs, the main point is not lack of funds.
I agree on that, on the other hand I don't see the lack of market as a big problem. I like to take Spotify as example, it started in Sweden, which is a market comparable to the Swiss one in terms of size, but after the first prototypes and early versions, it went global almost immediately.
Schneider-Ammann said that a change of mentality is required in Switzerland. He noted that while in the US, business failure is greeted with a “better luck next time” or with a similar attitude, on the other hand, in Switzerland, “if you fail with your business idea here everyone points the finger at you. You are branded a looser”. This seems to be the main goal and I totally agree with him.
IMHO, a company can move to a global scale from the start with the right plan, but it's the mentality and the fact that Swiss VCs care more about patents and product protection preventing Swiss Start-up to compete with the rest of the world, instead of caring about quality of the actual product and picking the right time to enter the market.
I heard some stories about companies collecting 500-800k in seed investment, spending 50% of it in legal fees protecting a product they still have to develop, failing later in execution for lack of cash... this is what, I think, needs to be fixed in Switzerland.
I understand your point. Yeah.. this is king of a ecosystem.. which needs to be balanced. The good news about the report is that it shows a mindset shift.. Switzerland is stable, warm (people) and radiates freedom .. for sure it is a good candidate to become the next hub.
It also has a lot of capital (although perhaps not necessarily risk-capital), and seems to be the only place in Europe that pays developers comparably to their pay in the US.
Switzerland aims to position itself as a FinTech hub though, where ___location is a huge issue due to regulation. E.g. if you're based in the EU you a 'passport' which lets you use your banking license in other markets; in Switzerland you don't.
In general the FinTech market is not (yet) cross-border friendly which is why the current prime startups here are either high-margin insurance brokers or our friends in the cryptovalley.
Those Swedish startups didn't form out of nothing. Not only was Sweden early when it comes to things like personal computers, internet access and English, but also notable in many other areas. Almost all successful Swedish companies are at least partly related to gaming, music or telecom. That stems from a rather long organic history of the demoscene, artists and industry. Attitude might have something to do with, but few people would say that the Swedish attitude is anything like what people commonly think is needed for entrepreneurship.
Yes, for that reason a POC I made for a side project costed almost 100 bucks to me (I was the single user)... I never checked the current bill because I was sure the total cost would have been around 15-20... when I got charged I noticed all the previous pushed versions had a single instance running, so the costs were incremental...
These are pretty much the same forecasts Switzerland and Norway were supposed to face when they rejected to join the EU... people losing jobs, Swiss Franc falling, export collapsing, etc... well, it went a little bit in a different way.
OFC leaving is totally a different thing from not being in at all, but still... there are going to be pro and cons, but the economy will adapt as happened in Switzerland and Norway. Some will gain, some will lose, but the general picture can be valid only in 3-5 years after the Kingdom is out, so not before 2022.
The UK is putting itself in a much tougher situation, this is absolutely not comparable to Switzerland and Norway.
And some of the forecasts about Switzerland turned out very real. We have to agree and comply with Europe on most things, without much bargaining power. And the EURCHF swings can literally put businesses to the ground overnight.
This could also be construed as the EU acting as a hegemony and abusing their economic power to force smaller countries to accept their terms. The same can be currently observed when some EU exponents demand that the Brits get punished for pulling out.
For Norway's case that is a meaningless statement.
Via the EEA, Norway accepted pretty much all of the EU with the exception of the Common Agricultural Policy and parts of the fishing policies, and the Euro.
Unlike the UK, Norway is part of Schengen, and outside of the areas mentioned above, Norway has fewer special considerations and opt-outs from EU directives than the UK has.
If the UK negotiates the same deal that Norway has, the UK will probably do ok, but that would in many areas mean tighter integration into the EU than currently. E.g. joining Schengen, dropping various opt-outs etc. It would also mean maintaining full freedom of movement.
I'd love to see that happen if only to hear the whining from the Leaver crowd, many of whom held up the Norwegian model as an alternative to convince people to vote Leave.
What? Norway is a member of the EEA and Switzerland has bilateral agreements that come to the same thing. Nothing changed for them they just don't get a say in the rules.
Norway and Switzerland are effectively EU members in everything but name -- they pay in to the single market and accept the four freedoms.
They both have very good reason for not joining EU proper - Norway has a giant fishing industry relative to other industries and Switzerland wishes to preserve her neutrality.
Note that Norway and Switzerland accept freedom of movement. Switzerland tried to introduce immigration quotas for EU workers, but that got scrapped a couple of months ago.
That book is by far the best one I ever read about Functional Programming in general, even if you don't want to learn Scala itself it is an amazing reading about FP.
Really? I wasn't aware of that problem in the system, any reference or article about that? I am just curios about the technical details why this was happening.
Borland really failed on the marketing and sales side, while providing the best tech, they completely missed the importance of having a strong sales team capable of scaling the language inside corporates, which were the driving force back in the days.
I have a lot of good memories of Borland Delphi 4.0 and 5.0 on Windows 95 and later 98/2000.