I know many companies that have to offer a better salary and train inside the fresh young programmers just hired to maintain or develop Pascal made software.
I've heard that anecdotally, but it's hard to find any evidence for it in surveys:
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#top-paying-technologies
Shouldn't be surprising to anyone, honestly... Object Pascal is my favorite language by far, but there is no conceivable way I could possibly come close to making a living programming if it was the only language I knew. As it stands I just happen to work for a company with a relatively large legacy Delphi codebase that I generally only get to work on when I'm not doing my main job writing C++/C#/sometimes Python code on their flagship applications. (And even then it's only as a maintainer... they're certainly not ever going to be adding new features to the Delphi application.) Also, I would say that upwards of 90% of the younger programmers I work with have absolutely never heard of Delphi or Lazarus, and are only vaguely aware of Pascal in the most "historic" sense possible.
That being said, am I really seeing people in this thread advocate for
Electron as a viable GUI-app-development-environment replacement over Lazarus? Yeah, no thanks, ever, for a variety of reasons:
-Every Electron app literally just bundles what amounts to a copy of Chrome (and all of the related binaries) with it when you, ahem, "build" them. (As they are in no way actually "native" apps.. just web apps that hide the fact that they're web apps.) However, unlike the actual Chrome, the bundled copies are immediately and permanently guaranteed to never be updated or receive bug-fixes as they aren't connected to the normal auto-update service.
-Because of the bundled dependencies I mentioned above, the total disk-space "payload" for each Electron app is generally around 250-500 mb. That's not HUGE in this day and age (although it's also definitely not ideal), but the more Electron apps there are in the wild are the quicker that adds up.
-They tend to use far more memory than they should, regardless of what they're specifically doing. (This is, again, related to the fact they're they're running through a bundled Chrome!)
-They're not particularly performant. Javascript is not fast. There are some offshoots of it that are a bit better than "vanilla JS", but overall they are for the most part entirely unable to compete with the level of optimization you can get with a compiled application.
-It has drastically fewer GUI components available for it than Lazarus (or Delphi) and is unlikely to ever come anywhere close to catching up as it simply isn't designed to be extensible in the same way.