Quote Originally Posted by billegge View Post
Thanks Shaggy for your post. I am a strong Delphi supporter but I am not biased. I gave .Net a chance from a technical perspective and it only strengthened my support of Delphi. I don't need to be elaborately experienced in .Net to make a correct choice, there are just some key points to consider and not the whole mammoth of .Net. There was one point about .Net that I saw better than Delphi and that it has the ability to compile for the specific CPU it is running on, Delphi has to make a general compile and this can make .Net faster. In fact I would consider .Net for computationally intensive tasks, I don't have a bias towards Delphi that would cause me to evade .nets strengths. My arguments for Delphi are strictly technical, thats how I compare them and I do so without prejudice.
Actually, everybody is biased. If you prefer A over B, then you have a bias. Perhaps the only people who are not biased would be those who hate both A and B with a white-hot passion, but that's just a different kind of bias. It's how we work, and it's actually necessary for our being able to function. You simply don't have enough time to fully compare two things as complex as a pair of programming languages in anything close to a comprehensive fashion, so you look at a few things and let bias do the rest. If you didn't work this way, you'd still be standing in your bedroom trying to decide what to wear until you starved to death.

The point is more to recognize your bias than to deny it. After all, your bias is just as likely to be right, anyways. In my case, I started with ASM and C++. The advantages of C++ over ASM were pretty clear. I then got into VB for work (VB5...sort of), and saw the advantages of that over C++, especially back in the pre-ANSI days where every C++ compiler did something different because none were fully compliant. That left me biased towards VB, but there were things I strongly disliked about VB. The biggest thing, oddly enough, was that it didn't really do Object Oriented. Secondarily was the inability to handle threading.

Once .NET came out, my bias for VB kept me from even looking at it for a couple years. Eventually, I found a problem that VB6 couldn't handle (PDA programming), so I was forced to .NET. At that point, I realized that it had all the features I wanted, and a FAR better IDE, too. It really is OO, it supports multithreading quite well, and so on. There are still some drawbacks, such as the fact that all mathematical calculations are equal. That shouldn't be. Integer division should be FAR slower than integer addition, but in .NET it is not. Therefore, .NET puts a limit on how much performance optimization you can do. However, .NET has no problem calling dll functions written in C/C++, so there is a way around that limitation, if needed.

So, I have it all and I have my bias, too. There may very well be tools out there that are better. Some folks on here are pusing Android and getting away from Windows and any such language. Perhaps they are right. But I have excellent tools to construct the programs I want to the level I want to construct them (unless MS really does drop all graphics such as XNA from .NET), which is a pretty high level. What possible reason would I have to not go with my preference? That's a bias, to be sure, but is it wrong?