About 30 years ago this week, Delphi 1.0 was released. Many of you probably have no idea what Delphi is, but it was a revolutionary rapid application development environment tool. Delphi made developing Windows applications orders of magnitude faster than it had been before.
Delphi wasn’t a trivial application itself, and it was decided to deliver it on a CD-ROM (remember those?). As far as I know, Delphi was the first major software application to be shipped on a CD-ROM instead of on floppy disks, though floppies were available for purchase — all 32 of them. There were, of course, protests about it, because at the time, CD-ROM drives were fairly new and not ubiquitous.
Delphi continued to grow in complexity and capability. Eventually, the installation filled a DVD, but Delphi outgrew that and required a long download process to install.
That complexity was made even greater because the IDE could be configured with components, code libraries, and IDE plugins. Eventually, it wasn’t uncommon for things to become so complex that it could take a week to install and set up a new developer. There were packages to install, directory paths to set, code to be properly located, relative paths to be configured, and many, many other small details to consider and set.
Other development environments like Eclipse or Visual Studio were no different. There were enough variations to all of it that no two development environments were precisely identical. The saying has been around for a long time, but this complexity is the root of the infamous saying “But it works on my machine.” (To which the response is, “Well, let’s ship your machine, then!”)
A significant advancement
But that was the bad old days. Today, things are very, very different. That is not to say that “package hell” isn’t a thing. Package managers like npm and brew have made things much better, but even they can lead to problems with versioning and other challenging complexities.
One of the differences today is that the notion of developing in a browser is a real thing. Because the most popular coding tool — Visual Studio Code — is written in TypeScript, it can rather easily be modified to run in a browser. And because it can be configured with code, and because modern development languages are configured in code as well, it becomes relatively easy to deliver a specific configuration with a specific version of an application to you in a browser. This is a significant advancement in how software development is done.