>I don't think I personally would want to use Delphi in this day and age
I totally understand where you are coming from, however I must say having everything compiled into a static-binary is a powerful thing that we often overlook today.
Case-in-point: Around 2007 I was consulting for a manufacturing facility, basically doing accounting system programming. Their warehouse department needed a small app that basic did two things (a) Check to see if a invoice was marked paid so they could ship, and (b) Record the Fedex / UPS tracking number back into the accounting system.
This was something that was meant to be added into the main accounting application and installed into the warehouse, but there were the usual practical issues (the PC that existed in the warehouse was an under-powered Win XP machine that couldn't actually run the accounting system, so a new machine needed to be purchased...basically weeks of time were required to solve it, but we needed a solution ASAP).
On a whim, I whipped up a simple single-dialog box "utility" in Lazarus / Pascal that would check if accounting had released the invoice and then record the tracking number. Literally took me maybe 3 hours to download, program, test, and deploy.
A few months ago I ran into the product owner from that consulting gig so many years ago....after catching up a bit, asking what had changed...he sheepishly added "I've still never got around to incorporating your warehouse 'utility' into the main program yet". I said 'surely its still not that old WinXP box?' and he said no they had upgraded a few times and just copied the .exe over each time and it continued to work.
Obviously such a simple 'utility' app is not a great example of why you would choose to use a language / platform, but it is a testament that what it does well, it does well. My 3 hours of billable time amortized out over 12 years now was a really good ROI.
Oh yeah, single static binaries are awesome. I think it's one of those things that helped make Go super successful as well.
If Go had a RAD, well, it'd be very enticing to me. Sadly they have only touched on UI a little. If you want to write something with Win32 API it's not too hard and there's plenty of good libraries, but sadly there's no VCL equivalent. I'd like that.
I guess in that sense Lazarus is still useful. But, I don't find myself needing a RAD too much. What I would've used a RAD for I find Python + Qt to be usable enough for.
I feel like Go sits in a very similar space to FPC. Go has a bigger runtime but does a good job of polishing the overall language semantics to be GC-favorable without being GC-centric. FPC is more mature, though, when you consider the large number of Delphi libraries, generics support, etc. Both of them have a much less complex build story than a C++ project since they have actual module support.
There are lots of similar apps in use in industry and they can be the final step to improve a workflow. There would be more if we could get a Lazurus-in-Python with a build to static binary system.
Similar case here where I work. There's a Delphi 3 application with an access database that has been in use for an unknown number of years. Last update to it was in 2002 or 2003 and it's been in read-only mode since 2005.
I totally understand where you are coming from, however I must say having everything compiled into a static-binary is a powerful thing that we often overlook today.
Case-in-point: Around 2007 I was consulting for a manufacturing facility, basically doing accounting system programming. Their warehouse department needed a small app that basic did two things (a) Check to see if a invoice was marked paid so they could ship, and (b) Record the Fedex / UPS tracking number back into the accounting system.
This was something that was meant to be added into the main accounting application and installed into the warehouse, but there were the usual practical issues (the PC that existed in the warehouse was an under-powered Win XP machine that couldn't actually run the accounting system, so a new machine needed to be purchased...basically weeks of time were required to solve it, but we needed a solution ASAP).
On a whim, I whipped up a simple single-dialog box "utility" in Lazarus / Pascal that would check if accounting had released the invoice and then record the tracking number. Literally took me maybe 3 hours to download, program, test, and deploy.
A few months ago I ran into the product owner from that consulting gig so many years ago....after catching up a bit, asking what had changed...he sheepishly added "I've still never got around to incorporating your warehouse 'utility' into the main program yet". I said 'surely its still not that old WinXP box?' and he said no they had upgraded a few times and just copied the .exe over each time and it continued to work.
Obviously such a simple 'utility' app is not a great example of why you would choose to use a language / platform, but it is a testament that what it does well, it does well. My 3 hours of billable time amortized out over 12 years now was a really good ROI.