Google Go, language of the year 2009

Google Go, released in November 2009, is the programming language that gained most market share in the whole year.

Congratulations and a big Thank You to Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson for coming up with something that the developer community had been demanding for more than a decade.

Source: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Next step: wipe Java from the face of the Earth.

Delphi Distiller v1.85 released

New in this version:
+ Delphi 2010 Update 4/5 unprotected permanently.
- To make things less confusing, Delphi 2010 Update 2/3 is not supported any more.

CRC32: 828E10E0
MD5: 207992917fbd49d5fcb05d74f4d63d00

Download from IsoHunt.

Embarcadero, working hard to become as unpopular as Borland

I was browsing the net today and people on a forum were commenting that Turbo Delphi Explorer wasn't available for download any more. I wanted to see that with my own eyes, so I headed to turboexplorer.com and found this:

Turbo Delphi 2006, Turbo C++ 2006, and JBuilder Turbo 2008 are no longer available. You can download a free 30-day trial version of the latest Delphi, C++Builder, and JBuilder products and learn more about them using the links below.

For those who are new to Delphi (hard to imagine, but I guess that there might be some new users), Turbo Delphi Explorer was a slightly crippled version of Delphi 2006 that Borland made available for free. It was like the regular Delphi but without command line tools, and you could not install third party stuff in the IDE (but you could create and use third party components in code). So it included the VCL source code, you could create database applications and could even make commercial projects with it. It was a very nice offer, especially when you think that this came from the late Borland (the bad one, who didn't care about developers and firmly believed that the future was in ALM tools --I'm glad that they finally went down the drain along with their ALM crap).

So if you wanted to learn Delphi or start a small business and you didn't have a thousand dollars to spend on a copy of Delphi you could just download Turbo Delphi and do real work with it. At a later time, if you needed maximum productivity or just loved to have a palette full of components, you could buy the regular Delphi. This made sense but, did it help increase Delphi sales? Probably not. Did it hurt? Probably not either. As usual, Borland marketing was nonexistent, nobody knew that Turbo Delphi existed, and if they did they didn't care, because no one likes to use products from a company that has been slowly dying since the end of the nineties.

When Borland, in a decisive step towards ALM glory, got rid of the Developer Tools Group, many people had big hopes that Embarcadero would be the home that Delphi had always needed. I kinda doubted it. When I saw that the same bunch of people that had been managing Delphi under the Borland name were now in Embarcadero, I suspected that everything would stay more or less the same. Except that I didn't expect that Embarcadero would kill the Turbo Explorer downloads.

Go compiler can generate Windows executables now

Up until now, the Go compiler only targeted Linux, FreeBSD, Mac, and NativeClient.

A revision committed today makes it possible to produce Windows executables. The revision applies specifically to 8l, the x86 linker.

More details:
http://code.google.com/p/go/source/detail?r=1282de9807c604c9cff553fa2ce668a7e23d23e0

What is Delphi Distiller

Delphi Distiller is a customization tool for Delphi 5/6/7/2006/2007/2009/2010 that allows you manage packages and experts and apply several tweaks.

FEATURES

• Choose what packages and experts are loaded by Delphi 5/6/7/2006/2007/2009/2010.

• Download links for Delphi 5/6/7/2006/2007/2009/2010.

• File associations manager for Delphi 5/6/7/2006/2007/2009/2010.

• Delphi 5 tweaks:
- Don't create .~bpl files.
- Don't create .cfg files.
- Use Tahoma font by default.
- Don't show splash screen.
- Customize editor colors.

• Delphi 6 tweaks:
- Don't create .~bpl files.
- Don't create .ddp files.
- Don't create .cfg files.
- Use Tahoma font by default.
- Don't show splash screen.

• Delphi 7 tweaks:
- Don't create .~bpl files.
- Don't create .ddp files.
- Don't create .cfg files.
- Use Tahoma font by default.
- Don't show splash screen.

• Delphi 2006 tweaks:
- Don't create .~bpl files.
- Don't create .local files.
- Don't create .cfg files.
- Remove toolbar gradients.
- Fix TabStop bug in TFrame's.
- Don't show splash screen.
- Remove Delphi 2006 license check.

• Delphi 2007 tweaks:
- Don't create .~bpl files.
- Don't create .local files.
- Disable MSBuild.
- Don't load additional .NET crap.
- Remove toolbar gradients.
- Don't show splash screen.
- Remove Delphi 2007 license check.

• Delphi 2009 tweaks:
- Don't create .~bpl files.
- Don't create .local files.
- Don't load additional .NET crap.
- Button to clear all Embarcadero licenses.
- Remove Delphi 2009 license check.

• Delphi 2010 tweaks:
- Don't create .~bpl files.
- Don't create .local files.
- Don't load additional .NET crap.
- Button to clear all Embarcadero licenses.
- Remove Delphi 2010 license check.