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Having just reached a successful milestone in a number of projects, I was pleased to see an article extolling the virtues of Pascal, or more specifically the Delphi dialect of Pascal. The author's quite right, and it's something I've felt for many years: Delphi hits the sweet spot between too much power (C, C++) and too much hand-holding and under-the-covers magic (Python, Java, everything else). It seems verbose, in that you use begin and end instead of { and } and so on, but it's not really. It works, and that's what I like about it.

Pity Borland can't manage to market it. They really need to sell it to someone with comparatively superior marketing skills. I think Rodney Adler is looking for a gig...

But I digress.

The most significant milestone is Gratian, the program I wrote for the Canon Lore database update. I've been off on a tangent adding a feature half-suggested by syridian, with the result that nothing worked properly because I'd had to rip the guts out to rebuild them. For the last week and a bit, I've been carefully excising the feature in question and trying to knit the guts back into something workable. Tonight I got the last of it behaving: Gratian can now upload changes in real time to the Canon Lore website. The new Canon Herald has a copy, so I have no doubt there will be changes coming soon to everyone's favourite red, blue and white elephant.

I still have bugs to fix, including some serious show-stoppers, but the thing is functional, and that's good news.

It's been a year since the most recent press release on the Turbo Explorer site. In that time, Borland and/or CodeGear have announced a smattering of new products, but none of them have trickled back to the free Turbo Explorer versions. It's like they're embarrassed they ever came up with an idea as clever as that, and they want everyone to forget about it before they actually cause some good publicity...

Sad, sad, sad.

Installing Turbo Delphi Explorer at the moment; I've been a Delphi programmer since version 1.0, but I largely gave up on it a while back because Borland, the company that produced it, couldn't sell raw meat to wolves; they're totally clueless. As a result, hardly any companies or departments use Delphi any more, mostly choosing to downgrade to (ugh!) Java, or drink the Kool-Aid and switch to Microsoft .NET. Then jeff_duntemann mentioned the new Turbo Explorer languages, and I've been waiting with bated breath ever since. This morning I downloaded the installer; now I'm setting it up.

Because I don't want to mess with my installation of Delphi 6, on which the Feta software is rapidly coming to fruition, I'm installing Turbo in a VMWare virtual machine. This still involves all the usual hassles — clearing disk space, rearranging files, installing upgrades — but at least if it stuffs up I'll be able to escape.

There was one weirdness: I didn't have room on my virtual C: drive, but it wouldn't let me change default drives. I had to unselect some features and click through to the page where I could finally select a disk drive. Then I clicked back to the list and reselected all the components, and it was fine thereafter.

OK, it's installed. Now let's see how it works.