Clearly there are some good applications running on the web out there.
How many are
a) highly nontrivial with hundreds of windows/screens, many with with multiple searchable grids, custom lookups, per-screen user-definable tab-stop order etc etc
b) reliable enough that the users can enter all the data they need without looking at the application (ie no missed keypresses or focus changes etc)
c) being developed, maintained and operated by a team of <10 devs?
Honest question, if you know then do tell! I'd love to hear how they're doing it.
Like, this year changes to gov't systems means we'll have to implement about a dozen new complex windows/screens, along with all the backend logic. We get the specs about 6-9 months before go-live, so it's not like we have a full year either.
Yeah we are, but alas this will be an answer, not a solution for you.
I'm also using a language from the 90s, but one even more niche than Delhi. We have desktop systems, and Web systems, and while they share a lot of source code, the UI procedures are different.
The Ide is still maintained an updated, but of course falls well behind visual studio now.
So for you to switch to this makes even less sense than staying on Delphi. We're under similar pressures to "rewrite in something more modern" but fortunately (for us) the business doesn't have the pockets that sort of project would consume.
Technically there's little reason to change, Functionally the language let's us program anything we want, so apart from the perceived "long term security" of rebuilding from scratch in c# there's not much upside.
For what it's worth we've built the system mostly with 1 developer, although on occasion as many as 3. The primary developer has changed once, and that was a smooth process so it can be done again if necessary.
I write all this to encourage you. If what you have is the best option, then stick with it, swapping bits out slowly as you need to. Make a transition organic, not one giant project. Code is just code. Customers don't care about the language, they don't care about the code, they only care about the solution to their pain.
Language is just language. It's syntax and libraries and data and algorithms.
I've been doing this a while, and I've been around the IDE bush, and the editor Bush and so on lots of times.
There are many disadvantages to using things that will never be popular, that are niche, but lack of joy is not one of them.
For me it's not in some shiny new language, or toolset, or whatever. The joy is in what you create, not the tooling. It's in creating solutions that make people's lives better. It's in putting good on the family table. It's in employing others and watch them do the same.
The things you talk about are language agnostic. What doesn't exist, we create.
I think where people get into trouble is trying to get too custom. It's been quite a while since I did any frontend stuff, but I was able to do work I was very proud of just sticking to default Angular 1 and Bootstrap and it worked great with a team fluctuating between 1-3 people. I was even able to write some code that could use reflection to generate forms based on the view models used by REST controllers in .NET, which was neat. But overall I'd rather work with Web tools than most desktop options out there. Clearly a lot of others feel the same or stuff like Electron wouldn't exist.
