Delphi on linux

[arioch]

I'm seriously considering learning a language. and Delphi sounds interesting, but is it suited for beginners? I've searched the forums for info on suited beginnerlanguages and 80% suggested C or C++! And that seems a bit over the top for me. Plenty of people have also suggested Visual Basic, even though it apparently sucks, it should be perfect for programmer newbies, but being platform dependent i'd rather get around it.

Delphi should be somewhat similar to Visual Basic in syntax, but monstrously more effective, and as far as i know, a compiler named kylix is available for linux, so maybe that would be suitable? I have NO prior experience at all (not even HTML)! Can anybody enlighten me concerning Delphi?

[bwkaz]

Well Delphi is just Borland's version of Visual Pascal. For whatever that's worth -- personally, I'd stay away from Pascal, but that's just me. IMHO it shares a lot of BASIC's faults -- it was originally created as a teaching language, and also isn't general enough.

Now Python, OTOH, was also created as a teaching language (IIRC), but it is general enough for other uses. You might want to take a look at it. www.python.org

Otherwise, perhaps Java, though I'd be a little leery of that if you don't think C++ is good...

I've also heard a couple of good things about Ruby, but never used it. So yeah.

[michaelk]

I use both kylix and delphi. kylix3 is opensource and includes both Delphi and C++ builder (windows equiv) for linux. It makes windows programming in linux very easy.

And I disagree with Bkwaz.

[Kai99]

arioch,

When I was still running Windows a few years ago I did some programming with Delphi 4-6 and it was a great development environment. It is easy to build your applications and Object Pascal is much easier to learn than C or Java.

Kylix doesn't run on Debian which really sucks because I will not run install a distro that uses rpm's. Get a book and give it a try I am sure you will have fun and learn alot.

Kai