[acdha]

This was voluntary. You have to remember that at the time the residing hype kings were the so-called 4GLs (e.g. Clarion, Clipper, PowerBuilder) and things like Visual Basic, Pascal (Delphi), etc. so Sun and Netscape were trying to present this as the pair of languages which you used to build the web, which was already emerging as the white-hot new thing starting to transform the world.

[ajuc]

Such a shame Clipper and Delphi didn't worked out.

In early 90s my uncle (now 60 years old electrical engineer) taught himself clipper from 0 (no programming background whatsoever, and no English language) and wrote a software for capturing and analysing temperature curves of polymer ovens at a factory where he works that is still used to this day. They keep a DOS PC just to run it :)

I don't think it's possible to do this with modern programming technology, there's too many layers of abstraction and unrelated asides blocking people from "just making it work".

[pjmlp]

Delphi is still around, and there is a striving community in Germany, big enough to keep conferences and magazines going.

But yeah, Borland really messed up.

[725686]

My older brother still maintains clipper code that is used in production.