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Free Pascal is very super mega ultra underrated. post few days ago, which seems relevant to this discussion.
C++ is а problematic, dead-end bloated language. ...
Why nobody seems to bother arguing with this nonsense? This kind of fanboyism and kind of religious bias towards is what shrinks this community even more.
When Delphi first appeared, the whole RAD approach coupled with a relatively sufficient language made it quite popular decades ago, but currently many other languages are quite enough and there are plenty of UI/RAD solutions out there. Really, there is nothing wrong with using C#, C, C++, Java or any other language these days (e.g. Swift) for application development and each of them, coupled with a huge collection of frameworks and libraries, are enough to work even on most challenging projects. Delphi, FreePascal / Lazarus work just fine as well, but since "Pascal" community is so small, it's difficult to convince companies and crowds to use a language that is unpopular and doesn't offer any significant benefits; in fact, at this point, no such language can possibly appear - existing languages already cover most needs, except, perhaps, for growing areas such as GPGPU, parallel computing, etc. - but these are pretty much saturated as well.
In this case, I think Lazarus as an IDE along with its LCL is the strongest bone. If Lazarus would switch to support C/C++ and LCL would be ported to that language as well - this, I think, *would* make it a killer product, at least for now. Designing UI outside of Delphi/Lazarus domain, although has become much easier, is still painful at times.
For instance, I can't help but to read posts regarding BGRABitmap with a bit of nostalgia attached to it - just to think of the things you could do in Delphi with TBitmap.Scanline some almost 20 years ago (and let's not forget about Graphics32 component too), and the whole thing of displaying more than 256 colors on the screen after DOS (please don't get me started with VESA) - these were some glorious days back then. I still remember walking like for two hours under the snow just to buy my first 3dfx Voodoo (was in Canada at that time) - it was so exciting! (Among many GPUs, Voodoo3, was the most exciting and pleasant to work/experiment with).
However, as almost every IT specialist who is old enough, would likely to experience this, even multiple times during lifetime, in computer world we have to realize that technologies that were so glorious many (and sometimes, maybe just few) years ago may become obsolete and we have to, un-learn and re-learn something entirely from scratch - and not necessarily because new tech is better than old one, but it's just happens. I'm not saying that this is necessarily going to happen (completely) with Delphi/FPC/Lazarus that some/all of us are using, but IMHO it's a tendency that becomes difficult not to see.