[fpc-other] Goodbye, and thanks for the fishes

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Mark Morgan Lloyd said:
> > Currently, for me it is not really a problem (small company, my preference
> > has the most weight), but there was some discussion a while back of hiring
> > more programmers and cooperating with certain other (SCADA like) companies,
> > so there was some discussion.
> 
> The SCADA package we inherited was written in a bastard mix of three 
> versions of MS C, plus a spreadsheet in MS Pascal and assembler 
> interfaces to an IBM communications controller. I replaced it by Delphi 
> code with PostgreSQL as backend, and am completely impenitent.

As said, now it is not so much of an issue, but in my last job I got tired
of every problem being blamed on Delphi and having to defend it, or worse,
by default have to step up and fix it.

That's the problem. Constantly having to defend it, having to deal with all
your suppliers, and beg them for plain C API dlls, for examples (simple and
console based so you can port them) etc etc. Not if you can do it, or if it
is technically sane.

In my currently job I'm the only programmer (though my boss is also somewhat
able in that department), so that is less of a problem, at least Delphi has
become even more of an island, or become totally backwards incompatible.

OTOH, the lack of progress is bothering me. The fact that generics still
don't do inline for instance.
 
> > In my previous job, I was more standard business apps, and then the only
> > viable alternative is C# IMHO.
> > 
> > One doesn't have to like it, but if I'm leaving Pascal because it is too
> > tiring to defend being in a niche, then you won't pick up some other niche,
> > and the above are (to me) the only viable choices. 
> 
> But is MS really committed to C# and .NET, and if not could it drown 
> Mono etc. out of spite? Which leaves C++, which as I see it has the same 
> issues as Object Pascal except that lots more people use it.

For pure businessprogramming, I think the chance that MS gives up C++ and
the parts that belong to it (MFC) are way, way higher than MS giving up
C#/.NET.