That's him, David Vacanti.
In 1974, David obtained a degree in electrical engineering from Colorado State University, and then joined Boeing, mainly designing various radars, and worked in one breath for 21 years.
In 1998, he jumped to Honeywell, where he continued to study radar and worked there for another 19 years.
It can be said that David has been dealing with radar all his life.
What is even more amazing is that in 1983, he started his side business and opened a company called "Vacanti Yacht Design" (does the United States allow working people to do this?), specializing in the development and sale of ship design software: PROLINES .
This software is constantly maintained and upgraded. Now PROLINES is 40 years old. It is already a mature, stable and powerful 3D CAD program, which can be used to design almost any type of ship.
With PROLINES it is possible to design such a ship:
This (won multiple rowing races):
Such:
How awesome is PROLINES?
Small boat design is a very niche market, users are only amateurs, professional yacht designers, PROLINES was launched in the late 1980s, and has been continuously developed and upgraded. There are more than 3,000 PROLINES installations around the world, which can be said to be worldwide Developed a following.
PROLINES was the first to introduce the concept of parametric hull design. By selecting a hull type and entering some basic hull dimensions, a hull can be created in seconds, and this concept of entering "hull parameters" has been adopted throughout the industry.
PROLINES internally uses NURB (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines), which makes it possible to create any conceivable hull shape and export it to STL, DXF, IGES, GHS GF1, VPP and other file formats.
PROLINES has even become a standard tool for civil engineers in American universities.
......
The tool that David uses to develop PROLINES is the ancient IDE Delphi .
In the late 1980s, David wrote PROLINES with Turbo Pascal and Metagraphics. In the DOS era, GUI programming was very difficult. He had to create drop-down menus, detect click events in windows, and create dialog windows. This made David It's too much trouble.
When Delphi was released in 1995, David was very excited. Turbo Pascal was upgraded to Object Pascal and provided the ability to quickly develop GUI. He realized that Delphi could greatly improve PROLINES, and immediately upgraded product development to Delphi, and has been Insist on developing with Delphi until today, 28 years later.
Delphi is a rapid development tool produced by Borland. It was very popular in the 1990s. It is easier to learn than VC, and the compiled code is faster than VB. It is nicknamed "VB Killer".
Many people like Delphi, even better than VB.
Foxmail, Total Commander, Skype, WinRAR, BeyondCompare and other well-known software are all developed with Delphi.
It is a pity that the company Borland started with Turbo Pascal and Trubo C/C++, created the amazing work Delphi, and later launched C++ Builder and JBuilder. It can be said that a generation of programmers grew up with Borland.
But at the critical moment when desktop applications turned to Web applications, Borland was greatly impacted by Microsoft, open source Eclipse, and Java, and finally fell, and Delphi also fell into the hands of Embarcadero.
Although Embarcadero is still launching a new version of Delphi (the latest version is 11.3 released in February 2023), there are probably only two types of people who use it:
1. Iron powder
2. Need to maintain the application developed by Delphi, such as David .
I talked about the simplicity of VB in the last article " Programming Languages Admired by Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds at the same time ". A fan left a message saying, "Simple means you are at the end, and you are the first to graduate."
In fact, this is not the case. Both VB and Delphi are easy to use, but they do not lack the ability to develop complex applications. The limits of VB and Delphi depend on the programming limits of programmers .
Through PROLINES, David has played to the limit of Delphi: generating complex formulas and calculations, powerful 3D CAD drawing rendering capabilities, and supporting high-DPI displays, which are crucial to the fine design of CAD applications.
Programmers like David, not only did not graduate, but developed better and better in their own track, which is a typical example of small and beautiful.
David's life is very comfortable now, and he goes out by boat from time to time.
Back to the "ancestral home" Sicily, Italy, to seek the roots and ask the ancestors. (PS: The father of Redis also lives in Sicily)
I'm not encouraging everyone to learn Delphi now, it's too old, and applications have moved from the desktop to the Web and mobile phones, and it's not the best choice for developing these applications.
What we have to think about is whether, like David, we can combine our professional advantages and hobbies, use our own development tools to develop a software, maintain it for a long time, keep polishing, and finally become a leader in the segmented field.
Such a long-term, stable sideline is the real sideline that programmers dream of.
Of course, if you want to accomplish such a thing, you must first have spare time, and second, you must have your own hobbies. There are too few Chinese programmers who can achieve these two points...
(over)
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