[lobster_johnson]

They really, really wanted to become an "enterprise" company. They acquired certain management people who saw development tools as a dead end, and decided all the money was in the enterprise.

But they misjudged the market, and invested in products like Visibroker and Midas (and dead-end tech like CORBA), not really understanding what they ought to be building.

(This wasn't the beginning of their troubles, though. They bungled a lot of decisions before then, especially with the purchase of dBase and Paradox, and the Windows version of Quattro Pro.)

I stopped using Delphi in the late 1990s, but even then I could see how it was heading towards obsolescence. Not the GUI development model itself, which was brilliant and which I sorely miss for OS X GUI development today, but Object Pascal.

Sure, Object Pascal is a good language, but it was very insular, not portable, often very Windows-specific, didn't integrate well with other things, and didn't evolve fast enough. I was able to work with C and C++ libraries, including Dialogic hardware APIs and Microsoft tech such as MAPI and TAPI, by writing a translator (htrans) that parsed header files into an AST and produced Object Pascal interface files for them. But it was very tiring. I had high hopes for C++Builder, but it was a major disappointment when it arrived. For one, it relied on a lot of proprietary C++ extensions.

I was using Delphi/Object Pascal for a lot a systems development, non-GUI backend stuff. It seems a bit quixotic today, but it was fun, and I liked the language. It sort of filled a particular niche that Java would overtake a few years later.

[pjmlp]

Thanks for sharing your experience, very interesting.

I left the ecosystem around Delphi 1.0, when I started to be more focused on UNIX at the university and only had p2c available. :(

For me C++ has the way out as it provided many of the language capabilities that Object Pascal also had.

Like many C++ early adopters, I also created my own set of classes (vector, string, lists) that insulated me from the unsafe C world as most as possible.

Due to its ubiquity, C++ is my language to go for native coding, but I hope one day it gets replaced by Rust, D, Nimrod or any other safer systems programming language.

[lobster_johnson]

It's a curious thing, technology exposure and ending up using — and being limited by — what you know exists.

I remember getting an Amiga in the early 1990s. I had programmed in assembly language on the C64, so on the Amiga I learned the Motorola 68000 assembly language, of course. I didn't know any other type of programming (other than BASIC). I had heard about C, but I didn't know people used it to write software on the Amiga. I remember buying a book about Intuition (the AmigaOS windowing system) and trying to figure out how to call the APIs from assembly language, which was of course fruitless, as I didn't even know how about the concept of linking, let alone how to look up library functions from assembly. Nobody had told me about C!

So I was a Windows person in the 1990s because that was the thing people used at home, and it was natural for me to use Delphi, not C++. I had looked at C++, but the possibility of using C++ for my projects never really struck me. Delphi was such a phenomenally productive tool. Windows seemed like the only viable platform. A lot of people are exposed to UNIX in university, but I didn't go there, so my first taste of UNIX was (aside from Amiga) Linux.

I agree with you about C++. I've had fun writing Go, but it feels like a stopgap solution until the real next-level language appears. Rust, maybe. Nimrod does look cool.

[pjmlp]

Yeah, on those days we only got to know what our friends new.

No Internet, No BBS, No Network.

[lobster_johnson]

Exactly!