Why would you dislike working with data modules or design time? It makes no sense to me.

Because I actually have five years experience in both and what you win in "time" in rad studio you lose in debugging because of how highly opinionated it is. an electron app as bloated as it is, is easier to maintain than this nonsense. Now imagine the unmaintainablity of delphi with whitespace hell of python... Yeah no thanks.

I worked on a millions of LOC of generally not-that-well-written Delphi code back in the day. Aside from the generally not-amazing quality of the code, it was never hard to debug, nor necessarily maintain.

There are many valid criticisms to levy at Delphi and Python, but those ain't it.

Similar. We have fairly large project, a few MLOC with many hundreds of windows/forms, all kinds of IO and whatnot. We've got code in production that was written back in Delphi 3 days (1997) that's chugging along just fine.

The only thing I think is hard to debug is focus related issues, due to the Windows event loop getting in the way. That's hardly a Delphi-specific issue though.

Other than that debugging and maintenance is quite easy. In fact we don't have to spend much at all on actual maintenance, as backwards compatibility has been great in the new versions. For example, the switch from non-unicode to unicode strings took us just a couple of days. And we're in the Nordics so we'd notice quick with our "weird" letters.

> The only thing I think is hard to debug is focus related issues, due to the Windows event loop getting in the way. That's hardly a Delphi-specific issue though.

That and losing the source code for some random, obscure vcl component you found on torry's back in the late 90s :-)

I have desktop product written in Delphi (device control, video, directx, data processing) which is more than 10 years old already. So far I have no problems maintaining it through numerous versions of Delphi.

I see, how many projects have you been part of? How old were they? In the past 15 years, I have seen terrible code bases trying to reinvent grids from first principles to pretty awesome ones with good separation of data and form logic using devexpress that I am proud to be part of and pretty happy developing. This is the kind of experience I have behind me when getting confused by blanket statements.

Sounds like you're holding it wrong.

Translation: trying to use it differently than it was intended. Considering the mentions of Electron, are you expecting it do behave like js in the browser?

Why? VCL should be possible to map to rather idiomatic Python.

That's not the issue I'm trying to point to it's how opinionated both are.

That's what I don't understand. VCL is opinionated in ways that should all maps quite nicely to a class hierarchy in Python. What specifically are you thinking off that would look out of place? Method names, maybe - I wonder if they translated those?

I was thinking should I bother to check but your invaluable insight has made my decision easy.

Interesting usually junior or medior people have such a strong negative opinion about tools but you touched Delphi so I must guess you have at least a couple decades of experience? Tools and languages have tradeoffs and it is always more constructive to see them through that lens. If you want to make a native UI intensive app in no time and iterate quickly, yes Delphi is your tool (remember how crazy fast pascal was building on machines from 20y ago!). Do that in let's say c++ and your experience will be totally different. Python too has huge qualities for prototyping quickly and gluing apis (to develop ML models for example!).

Usually you like the language because it fits well what you want or like to do.. if you love system programming then Rust or C have a better chance to be marvelous to you.