The history of programming and the Delphi environment

The first programs were written as numeric sequences of processor commands, that is machine code, and finding a mistake in them was very hard. Assembler gave the commands short names and made the work easier, but a program still depended on one type of processor. In high-level languages the writing came closer to human language and a translator converted the text into machine code; in structured programming a big task was divided into procedures and functions, so several programmers could work on one program. Object-oriented programming joined data and the methods that process it in one object: for example, a window object has a width and a height (properties) and open and close (methods). In visual programming ready objects (a button, a label, an input field) are placed in a window with the mouse and their properties are set, and the environment itself writes a large part of the program text. The next stage is generic programming: one algorithm or method is written so that it works with different kinds of objects and data (for example, one “area” command for a triangle, a circle and a rectangle). Delphi is a visual environment and its language is Object Pascal; Delphi is now produced by Embarcadero, and a free alternative is Lazarus (based on Free Pascal).