RAD (Rapid Application Development, such as Oracle's colossal frameworks) frameworks aren't rad at all. They promise to let you focus on your business code, but instead what they do is bring you additional problems to have gray hairs over.

Thoughts?

There's probably someone out there with a theory that says all the programming time savers / frameworks or whatever it is ... save a huge amount of time for the folks who created the product because they know the limits / ins and outs.

But the moment someone has to work with it beyond the scope as intended (either due to lack of knowledge or with knowledge and business requirements start to go outside what it is intended for) ... it has an inverse effect on efficiency.

They're generally just vendor lock-in frameworks. They're engineered to allow a shiny tech demo and ensure your host and data platform are Oracle branded so they get those sweet, sweet licenses.

I agree with both of you. I've created several prototypes with low code development tools which is just another term for rad and yes you can build applications fast if you follow the way the vendor suggest. Nevertheless software is complex and really hard to generalize and well... Writing tests in such a tool is always a problem.

Previous employer was a delphi wizard. Dude would pull out apps like if it was nothing.......all for the price of +$3k per license on vendor locked in tools.

Its a 50/50 sort of thing, and just like @SortOfTested said it's all about pushing out them sweet expensive af licenses.

I sometimes wish Embarcadero would be more open to be more open sourced (because Lazarus doesn't hold a candle to the amount of RAD shit you can do with Delphi) and/or not selling their licenses for that ridiculous prices.

@AleCx04

>amount of RAD shit you can do with Delphi

No kidding.

We transitioned from Delphi to C#/WPF and its been amazing to see how one Delphi dev can do/did the work of 10 C#/WPF devs (at least here, YMMV). Teams spends months, yes months, on perfecting their MVVM patterns before the user can actually use the app.

@SortOfTested Thank you for the sweet, sweet clarification.

In addition to what @SortOfTested said.

If you ever wanted to find out how high your pain resistance is...

Invite an tech evangelist from a large company.

I've had the experience... 3-4 times I think? Mostly when I was forced to visit client expos and the client invited "tech experts" who "present the future".

Everytime I had clockwork orange in my mind. Brainwashed zealot would be a more fitting term... listening to them was always a experience where pain and shame blew up the scale.

Sometimes they're the reason why some managers have _very_ absurd thoughts.

This reminds of labview and siemens sinmatic plc launguage. Both are pretty good at their job.

@PaperTrail they took it to the extreme with Pascal. One thing that I specifically like about this language is how much it does not let people do "cute" shit with it. Yeah there are some tricks that you can pull, but for the most part it is legit and straight forward.

Most of the big projects that I have seen working with it either remain with it or switch on account of how expensive it is to hire people good in it. I for one absolutely love it, I am currently making a prototype for a budget application that we have at work on Lazarus Pascal, and it has been a breeeeeze man. If shit works well enough and I get some other crazy ideas, like for example getting into mobile development THROUGH delphi I will have my institution get me a license.

I already know mobile development in standard Android Java and ios with swift, but I like fucking around with expensive toys.