Call for Community help: Sorting priorities
Given that we are a large group of people, doing very varied work – lets get the gist of where we would like to see EMBT have the technical focus for the coming versions by doing a poll.
We do the poll with a proper anonymous polling tool and publish the results, so that noone feel they have to give up their privacy or vote with the party line. Suggestions for a good, reliable polling tool that can’t be manipulated, are welcomed.
I request that we stay away from SKU definitions, prices, upgrade policies, and everything else that reeks of pointy haired boss.
This is where I need the community spirit!
We should try to keep the poll relatively short – so we need to limit the options.
My suggestions to get the discussion going:
1. My primary Delphi use
ISV, Corporate dev, Contractor, Hobbyist, …?
2. My current SKU
AppMethod, Starter, Professional, Enterprise, Architect
3. What do you write in Delphi?
Categories: Components, Libraries, Utility UI, CRUD UI, Data crunching, Reporting, Games, Graphics, Web, …? Can we manage to keep this list down to a managable number?
4. Where do you use Delphi?
Platforms: Win32, Win64, Android, iOS, OSX
5. What is your biggest challenge?
IDE Stability, Debugger Stability, Compiled Code Quality, Library Quality, Lack of API support, Lack of platform support?
6-n. What do you want in the next Delphi versions
Here I think we need to create sub categories, such perhaps broken down by the previous options. Is it possible to make a poll that lets the votee prioritize the options?
Should some of these sections go? What else should be in there? Let’s spend a couple of weeks refining this, before we create the poll and spread it as widely as possible. Note that I am not a poll making specialist – so keeping it sane will require the effort of the group.
#LightACandleAndBurnDownTheHouse or some other inspirational quote here.
The only problem I have is to what hat I should be wearing to do the poll – my corporate developer’s hat, or my hobby programmer’s hat…? They are quite different hats.
Yeah, I can see that challenge. I guess you have to make a choice depending on where you place your priorities – or – we duplicate the polls into a professional point view and a hobbyist point of view – and present the results separately.
But will Embarcadero Technologies and Marco Cantù hear our wishes or will they be ignored?
There is no guarantee that they won’t be ignored, but let’s make sure they are heard.
We have to remember that we are only a theoretical 5800 people here – which by any standard probably is only a tiny fraction of the user base.
How about Google docs poll? For example: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1_zdbqpFvVz9sRGxxTR5WnU8wtss7FoF-4Dhns2INuH0/edit?usp=sharing
(Just an example to show what this would look like, it’s NOT intended to be the final product!)
Walter Prins – Google docs poll is unfortunately not anonymous.
Really? Given that you can publish it the wild wild web where clearly submissions are by definition anonymous (if so then you can’t enforce no-duplicates rule of course) and even with duplicates checking on (which requires login) there seems to be no identification field of any sort that reveals your identity as such? What am I missing?
Lars Fosdal BTW, I think with SKU you should add PRO with mobile, PRO with FireDAC and PRO with mobile + FireDAC options.
Wordpress plugin to do it: https://wordpress.org/plugins/awesome-surveys/
Walter Prins – Had a look at Google Forms – looks different from the last time I tried. Perhaps an option.
Eli M – Do you know anyone who could host? I don’t use WP.
I can host it. I looked at Surveygizmo.com and Surveymonkey.com as well and they do have free or limited time options which may or may not work depending on the length of the survey.
Lars Fosdal downside of an anonymous poll (or any poll tied to social network accounts) is that it can be easily gamed, or be claimed to be easily gamed, and eventually can be discounted as meaningless by observers that disagree with it.
Eric Grange – Yeah. – I am trying to figure out if there are services that can reduce the risk of this.
There is already a Delphi category on User Voice – https://delphi.uservoice.com/forums/4432-general – is the point here to have this only be a poll of G+ Delphi Community members instead of adding to the global Delphi voice?
David Intersimone Kind of pointless if nobody from the company reads it?
David Intersimone – Is there a point… well, you tell us, but think it through before you answer. The reason there is little EMBT bashing in this community, is not because there is an overall happiness with the current state of Delphi and the policies of EMBT, but because the owner is a forum nazi.
The intent is to spread the poll further than just this community.
Lars Fosdal David Intersimone
This was posted in 2009.
https://delphi.uservoice.com/forums/4432-general/suggestions/230369-improve-optimization-of-generated-code
EXACTLY 6 years later did anything came out of it? I don’t think so. This is why these kinds of things are pointless if the company doesn’t listen.
José Ramírez – Drop it. It is pointless to lift out a single feature and say – “see, they didn’t listen”. There is always a matter of priorities to consider.
F.x. for me, code performance is not my biggest worry, while IDE performance and stability is. For others, performance is pri.1. For anyone using a right to left language, full bi-di support is probably up on top (and it does rank top on uservoice – even if pretty much pointless to the average western user). Lots of people wanted Win64 – got it. iOS – got it. Android – got it. OSX – got it. A good replacement for dbExpress/ADO/BDE – got it. Cloud support – it’s there.
Everybody wants something – nobody can deliver everything.
I’ve voted before on the uservoice issues that are important to me, but it’s been a while since last time.
IDE performance and stability isn’t even on there – and I believe anyone with a medium sized project (500k+ LOC) knows that an IDE crash is not an if-, but a when-question – particularly if you have more than one project, and switch between them.
The stability of the debugger under Win64 is a lottery. Add multithreading, and you have a winner. Not on uservoice.
These two can have me restarting Delphi 50-60-70 times a day. Not fun.
Any poll is just a sample of a particular section of the user base. It doesn’t represent the wishes of us all – but it can EMBT help seeing patterns across multiple polls.
The yearly EMBT poll is probably not far off – but the trend have been that the poll is fishing for what people want. The problem with that is such “want” polls tend to be fishing in the “nice to have” petting pool, and not necessarily in the “need to have” shark tank. How do I know? Because I’ve voted for stuff I thought would be nice to have before – but it turned out that I never needed it.
I hope we can make this poll about what we need.
Lars Fosdal You talk about IDE issues. That’s why smart people use Sublime Text x64 with a custom build system. 😉
José Ramírez – We use Continua CI from VSoft (FinalBuilder) – and which is awesome – but which in this context doesn’t do diddly for debugging, where you run, stop, inspect, change, recompile, run – all day.
José Ramírez That’s not an IDE alternative though, that’s a notepad and command line alternative.
Eric Grange True. But it get’s the job done when quick modifications are necessary. Editing a 1MLOC+ codebase isn’t exactly fun.
José Ramírez – You should be using the FPC compiler 😛 How do you debug your 1MLOC apps?
It will be interesting to see the answer for Visual Studio Community Edition from Embarcadero Technologies
Can we stay on topic, please?
I think the topic is close to the end.
What do we want, a place where we can voice our concerns/wants/would-likes/etc but there isn’t a place where Embarcadero Technologies will listen to us and if they do, it isn’t in a visible way. So in the end, what is the point?
Survey sample: http://www.fmxexchange.com/delphi-priorities/ I don’t see that it can do chained questions (where answering one way opens another way). That could be done by just linking to another page maybe.. or have the sub surveys just be different surveys. The results could be published together.
Nicholas Ring – The point is to try in the face of adversity. What’s the alternative – give up?
Eli M – Will it (generally speaking) prevent using the same ID to vote several times?
Some open ended options would be nice, f.i. one of the biggest challenges is the lack of a thriving and engaging ecosystem (training your devs on the language and platform is all fine and dandy, but it’s not practical, I would rather train them on the business-specific aspects, so they have a good grasp what the code is there to accomplish and who will be using it for what, and this can already involve more than enough training)
(and yes, this is another way to ask for some free/open kit, so such an ecosystem could exist tomorrow, like it used to exist)
Eric Grange – How would you prefer to see this? More advanced demo apps with source?
Further on the eco system:
A functioning and well managed official community forum would be a start (kicks EMBT webmaster shin(s)).
Contribution possibilities to the wiki for the MVPs, would be good.
Lars Fosdal
covers it, especially the part:
“You’ve got to know when to hold ’em
Know when to fold ’em
Know when to walk away
Know when to run”
To me, this is a battle that will not be won.
You have Marco Cantu and David Intersimone trying to keep the programmers calm but they seem to be going against what Embarcadero Technologies is actually doing.
Lars Fosdal Don’t get me wrong, what I think you are trying to do is good but one needs to pick fights which there is some hope in winning and I don’t think this is one of them.
If you do get some where, I will shout you a beer if we ever meet up. If it doesn’t pan out, if we ever meet up, I will still shout you a beer 🙂
Lars Fosdal Working community services would be a very minimalistic start indeed.
A global, official, flexible package manager would be another aspect (something intrinsically open ala npm or nuget, rather than intrinsically closed ala GetIt).
But eventually a community is also based on attractivity and willingness of its member to devote time to it.
Personally, I feel that devoting time to support an expensive software tool is not something that can happen, especially when the tool is not aiming for tech excellence but just “good enough”. Some free offering may level the field with other dev environments, but without tech excellence it may just reduce profits.
Alternatively some official marketplace could be made, with the hope of fostering something like app stores do, but for it to work, the prices would need to be small, which means volume, which I do not see it happening with a high-priced “good enough” dev tool.
Anyway, the above have long been known (esp. the forum issues), and no action taken.
I find the forum situation more than a little surprising. In context of the time used, combined with lack of information when it comes to efforts and indication of time frames for fixing the problem, the appropriate terms are: Unheard of, Unprofessional, Reputation damaging.
The new Embarcadero community forums have been up and running continuously ever since nce we launched the next gen community site. We are slso active on other social sites including this one.
“You have +Marco Cantu and +David Intersimone trying to keep the programmers calm but they seem to be going against what +Embarcadero Technologies is actually doing.”
Say what? We are joining in on the conversations with fellow Delphi developers.
“A global, official, flexible package manager would be another aspect (something intrinsically open ala npm or nuget, rather than intrinsically closed ala GetIt).”
The open IDE api(s) are there for anyone or any group to build or integrate other package manager(s). GetIt is what we are using to deliver add-ons for RAD Studio.
David Intersimone – The new community forums leave much to be wanted from a performance and usability perspective (and now I am being very PC and overly polite).
The festering wound is the old forums which are still there and used (when they work) – and these are the ones that the long time users go to – and complain about. Fix them – or close them and route the users to the new forums.
As for the open IDE api(s) – those that develop for them, may have a few points to raise about documentation and functional completeness?
We do appreciate you guys joining in the conversation. As mentioned before – the intent of this community is to focus on the technical things (stuff that works, doesn’t work, or that needs to exist).
There is a need for acknowledgement that you are aware of what some/many consider to be real and major technical issues with the current versions of Delphi.
How can that best be achieved? Roadmaps. Notices about what is the current fix or add focus. Communication.
David Intersimone Yes, you and Marco Cantu are joining in on the conversations but what you (and Marco Cantu) are saying isn’t what Embarcadero Technologies are delivering.
And just in case you want examples. There was talk about fixing up the NNTP forums (which I think Lars Fosdal is talking about). There was talk about getting bugs fixes a priority yet the VCL/RTL/compiler seems to be getting buggier.
David Intersimone I know that many are not happy with the fact that new community site does not have NNTP, but even if we put aside that, your new community site is still far from usable.
I have tried to raise some issues way back it was started, but there were no improvements. in the meantime. I will state some of the issues here again.
First, your new community site is extremely slow. Waiting 10-15 seconds pages to appear is way too much. In comparison, I reading old forums through web interface never takes more than 2-3 seconds (when they work, of course).
Second, you are not paying enough attention to spammers there. Even after I do report spam it can still linger there for days. You really should have company people cleaning the place up on their own.
In community of that size, especially since most of us are using our real names, you have to show persons first and last name. It is really hard to tell to whom you are talking if all you have is “John”, and in best case picture that you can maybe recognize from some other site.
When we are talking about user pictures, they are way too big on forum beside users post. First it takes time to load them all, and if the post is just one or two sentences, you basically get long page full of empty spaces between posts.
Sometimes posting does not work at all. So I never know if I will be able to post something I have written.
Also, posts can easily end up in wrong topic, especially Welcome/Forum Rules that takes over as default no matter from where you tried to add new topic. If I am under Programming section and I click New topic, I certainly want it to be under Programming and not something else.
There is myriad of similar navigation issues there, but listing them all would be a tad too much now.
Without investing more time and work that community will always be just “last resort” if all other options fail, and never real community where people go in search for answers, help or discussion.
A lot of us are using G+ communities like this one. Is there an NNTP support I don’t know about?
Dalija – use the Embarcadero Answers module for questions or Stack Overflow or both – your choice.
Lars Fosdal Yes it is currently set to cookie based (which obviously isn’t cross browser) or it has an account based option.
David Intersimone I think you have missed my point. It is not about choices I have, or don’t have. It is about making your new community site better and more usable than it is now.
Dalija – I did not miss the point. I was just questioning whether NNTP is a show stopper or not for newsgroups.
We are working on a next generation community stack based on a more recent version of Joomla (v3) and JomSocial plug-ins. This will provide additional functionality and performance for the next gen site. The newsgroups we use are Kunena (kunena.org) and they have NNTP on the request list but have no ETA date for us or their other customers.
The current generation site was our first on the Joomla stack and plug-ins. The feature set is set for what we have currently. We have loads of plans for future feature work, more about that after we test and launch the v3 stack/servers.
David Intersimone – Thanks for adding more info on the forum progress. I was a bit surprised of the brief and dismissive replies you first made.
Some of the people in the old forums will claim NNTP is a must, but I would be surprised if there was a significant number of NNTP users. You should have usage statistics, no? There is no NNTP support for Google+, albeit you can follow and comment on a thread by email if you want to. I don’t think it’s common to do so, though.
The forum needs to be responsive, mobile device friendly, and indexed by search engines. The Joomla search is just not in the same league.
It’s layout must be effective for identifying what’s old and what’s new for the threads you have read and commented – and behave like G+ with regards to a form of notifications that guide you directly to the thread. Dalija Prasnikar had a good summary of feature requests further up this thread.
Last but not least – you need moderators that are gentle but firm, and that doesn’t let ye olde forum warriors turn it into their chatting ground and place of much academic wankmanship.
Lars Fosdal I personally only use G+ through mails and targeted notifications: I find the G+ home to be quite unusable: too many things happening too fast to be able to keep track of anything.
Eric Grange As a whole, G+ can be overwhelming. Communities, circles and searches helps narrow things down. I get notifications when specific people post, or there are posts in communities of specific interest, or to get updates on threads I’ve been active in – otherwise I search and browse, mostly.
As a “forum” – G+ communities leaves much to be desired. No threaded conversations, no permalinks to comments, poor options for categorizing, no source code formatting. But, they are fast, and easy to use.
David Intersimone Thanks for the update.
As far as NNTP is concerned, personally I am not using it, so I may be the wrong person to ask. But I can see why some people like it the way they do and advantages NNTP provides.
Eric Grange – To clarify my previous comment “you can follow and comment on a thread by email if you want to. I don’t think it’s common to do so” – I meant that you can comment on a thread by doing email replies to the G+ notification. That’s the part I don’t think is very commonly used. I believe most people go to the G+ UI to reply.