Conspiratorial thought - did OpenAI shut down Sora because one of their models started attaching it's weights to all the output videos, and some how escaped the farm? Not an original thought, "If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies" authors proposed this is an option for an AI to escape the sandbox. lol. Imagine.
I feel like this commitment to Windows quality post is actually just copilot generated slop.
Someone in the comments here said nobody loves Windows. I probably did love Windows 7. I felt that it was the best of all worlds, huge support for hardware, basically rock solid on good hardware, gaming performance was fantastic.
In my opinion, Windows has spiraled downwards ever since 7. So much so that I finally switched to Linux permanently. Windows 11 and the forced AI integration was the absolute last straw for me.
The only thing that had really kept me on Windows lately was the gaming side of it. As I've gotten older, the games became less important. Now Proton pretty much gets me compatibility on 172 of 173 games in my steam library. Sure I had to search and find and compile my own controller driver, but it wasn't super painful, probably beyond the realms of an average user still.
It's an interesting issue, personally I wouldn't look at someones employment history, and working with legacy tools/environments, as a black mark, but it could be indicative of someone who simply refuses to move to new technology.
I've also hired some younger people who were actually interested in picking it up because they were keen to learn anything they could, and you can learn plenty from Delphi despite it's warts.
Over time I've described myself as suffering a kind Stockholm Syndrome w/ Delphi now, and some of the guys on my team have flat out refused to learn it for maintaining some of our systems.
And Turbo Pascal was CHEAP, I think in terms of what you got for your $50? I can't remember the original retail price, you couldn't beat it. Hell, if you kept your eye out you could get copies of Delphi, / Delphi 3 for the cost of a "introduction to Delphi" book which almost always came with a standard license of Delphi.
Hobbyist Borland was the best Borland. A really amazing company that fully embraced those original tinkerers... Enterprise <X>, full vomit, but hey, that's where they got to charge many thousands per seat, so you can't really blame them.
Up until Delphi 5 or 6 the cheapest Delphi would be just $100, it wasn't until Borland became Inprise and chased that big $$$ enterprise money that their prices skyrocketed.
Turbo C was actually about the same price, I paid £32 I believe, and then paid £50 for the upgrade to Borland C++ 3.1 (all as a single purchase), vs paying the £200 or so for C++ on it's own. I remember it arriving the day after in a huge 'crate' full of books.
For Delphi it is a combo of the Indy project (IdHttp), and superobject (probably other json parsers too but superobject is quick and fairly solid).
However, given I've yet to find Delphi code that straight up compiles in Lazarus/FreePascal, you probably have your work cut out for you, but if you google for [superobject/indy] for Lazarus, others have started those hikes, and you may find there are working versions of one, or possibly both of them. I've never looked.
Yeah, this... You can have circular dependencies, as long as it is in the implementation only. Takes some thought on interface definitions to avoid these things. Sometimes it's a real pain.
There's also the issue that when you split out units, and then you have a user who wants to consume say, a library you've written, you then have to document "Ok, to use this you have to use X, Y, and Z units for type definitions"
A better approach is to have a single "entry point" unit if you will, that simply re-declares all of the types from the X,Y,Z units, so that when you go to use the code you've written, you only have to import W, and get all the type defs already. (Hard to explain what I'm talking about I guess)
Mate I've got a project whose first lines of code were struck back in the 80s in Turbo pascal. Your "continuously deprecated" argument doesn't hold a lot of water from where I sit... In terms of actual language features/changes that have caused deprecated status, those are very few and far between. Maybe some VCL database controls, for sure it would have sucked to have built stuff relying on interbase, but that is not a language/compiler feature, that was CodeGear EOL that particular project (I had to manage the exit strategy on one of our projects where it relied on that crapware)
Even library developers are pretty good at pumping out versions of their libs that have support for even Delphi 5. I know of at least 2 people who are still doing windows dev on Delphi 5 or maybe 7, I can't recall.. the very definition of "from my cold dead fingers".
Suffice to say if you were one of those real hold-outs, not updating to the latest.. you wouldn't have generics, dynamic arrays, lambdas/anonymous functions, and you would probably struggle to grab much code written in the last decade and compile it straight up.. but that would probably be the case for a number of languages that have had core features added to them over time.
The fact that the system is proprietary certainly is an issue, but every install always ships with all the source code of the RTL, VCL, and clear instructions on how to compile it with a "you're on your own now" sense of adventure.
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