Probably depends on your specific company or industry

Personally I've never seen anyone use Pascal as anything other than the butt of a joke or a background slide on "how far we've come" since the 80s. Nobody even seems to remember object Pascal.

... But I'm also in a sector that routinely relies on Fortran code so ymmv

Unfortunately this is what AI is leading to. People will stop learning new languages and companies will stop developing new ones because AI is now supposed to write code.

I tried to make some LLMs write (GW-)BASIC and they failed miserably. Maybe they were only trained on some modern BASIC that doesn't look like BASIC at all? Could not convince them to use line numbers at all. Maybe with a lot of context they could do it, but my prompts did not work, even making I clear I wanted line numbers.

(Free)Pascal seems to work great though. I think enough of that is in training data that it can be used as well as any language. There isn't much special to consider to get it right. It is not like figuring out how to do Rust or C++.

People wanting shortcuts and to do less work/thinking is about to become the major force in society over the next generation.

You got a point here however I would just flip his argument. It is best to rely on LLMs that have a lot of training data exposure, and here is Python etc. dominating over Delphi.

I for example find LLMs not useful in regards to coding on 6510 or 68000 especially in assembler when developing code for a product of the demo scene.

x86 became pretty useful lately, but still, on certain machines with bit manipulation, you would better take your time to triple check your code and don't rely on LLM.

I would love to see a change here.

You might be right. Have you seriously considered that you're wrong though? What if you're investing a dead craft and it never pays off? have you engaged with that idea and rejected it?

> Microsoft hired the designer in chief of the delphi language at the time to design c#

... and Anders Hejlsberg continues to be the lead architect of C# and is also core developer of TypeScript!

Actually he went to Microsoft based on referrals from ex-Borland working at Microsoft.

From his own words, https://behindthetech.libsynpro.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-a-c...

"Make basic UIs easily" is a major appeal of C# workflows in the usual CRUD-type development.

FreePascal, that I believe is supposed to be reasonably Delphi compatible, supports "Intel x86 (16 and 32 bit), AMD64/x86-64, PowerPC, PowerPC64, SPARC, SPARC64, ARM, AArch64, MIPS, Motorola 68k, AVR, and the JVM. Supported operating systems include Windows (16/32/64 bit, CE, and native NT), Linux, Mac OS X/iOS/iPhoneSimulator/Darwin, FreeBSD and other BSD flavors, DOS (16 bit, or 32 bit DPMI), OS/2, AIX, Android, Haiku, Nintendo GBA/DS/Wii, AmigaOS, MorphOS, AROS, Atari TOS, and various embedded platforms. Additionally, support for RISC-V (32/64), Xtensa, and Z80 architectures, and for the LLVM compiler infrastructure is available in the development version. Additionally, the Free Pascal team maintains a transpiler for pascal to Javascript called pas2js."

https://www.freepascal.org/

You do not get that much portability with many other languages. C, perhaps. But FreePascal has a bigger standard library and many other libraries that support many platforms. It is also a much safer language with checked array bounds and while there is support for low level unsafe things you do not have to use those nearly as often as in C. And while the compiler might not be as fast as Turbo Pascal (or Delphi?) it is still amazingly fast compared to any other compiler I have used this century.

What's not to like? Guess the lack of attention from developers and potential risk of there not being enough around to maintain it? I honestly do not know, but you do not hear much about it and not many projects seem to use it.

What kind of evidence do you want? I wrote Delphi for years and I'm now a Typescript developer. Is there any current major software written in Delphi?

The most important ones I found are the windows MySQL GUI, Cheat Engine and Total Commander. I genuinely was searching for more than 10 minutes and everything else is either abandonware or has been rewritten to a different language.

Have you tried WinForms? It’s a similar workflow to Delphi except I find C# a lot nicer to work with than Pascal. WPF is also good if you need a program that’s more flexible with being resized, but you have to do your layout in XML rather than drag and drop (although you do still get live updates of what your window will look like while you’re writing the XML).

[delayed]