Do you suppose Delphi would have wider adoption if it were open-source? E.g. are the Delphi language features and ecosystem compelling when compared with more widely adopted languages with a community governance structure?
Delphi would have a much wider adoption if the compiler was open source and the IDE was propietary and sold only as a subscription, that is, similar to Jetbrains Kotlin model.
Unfortunately it will not happen because Embarcadero current strategy revolves around milking their existing enterprise customers while their IT policies require that an aplication in production is built with components that have a support contract in place.
Ironically, when I watched the Kotlin conf, that seems exactly where JetBrains is trying to drive Kotlin, boosted by Android's adoption, trying to make a Kotlin eco-system out of it.
- if you’re alluding to the idea that Kotlin would be driven in the direction of closed source compilers and tooling in order to “milk” enterprise adopters: that would require a bizaare set of changes, including changing the license of both the tooling and the compiler - neither of which require copyright assignment, so JetBrains are not even free to do.
- if you’re betting on an open compiler but closed tooling, again that would require changing the license of the tooling, which JetBrains is not entirely free to do since it does not get assigned copyright on contributions.
I don’t know what agreement JetBrains has in place with Google, but I’d wager it precludes making Kotlin proprietary.
I am alluding to the tooling features only available in Clion and Enterprise version, alongside the comprising language design to be able to satisfy JVM, JS, Native, ART and WebAssembly.
And the active role to make it a InteliJ language for most part, withdrawing support for Eclipse.
I don't understand what you and grandparent are trying to say; can you explain in more detail about the parallels you see between JB/Kotlin and Borland/Delphi?
Delphi fall apart because Borland trying to grow bigger than they could chew, ignored their independence developer customer base and turned into enterprise customers as their main selling target.
Now after a couple of changing hands, about 4 of them, they are trying to grow back the numbers of the small shops.
Likewise JetBrains seems to have forgotten the JVM roots of Kotlin and is now trying to go beyond JVM, comprising language design choices on features that don't have the same semantics, e.g. value types on JVM vs JS/ART/Native, or the incompatible memory semantics of immutable types on Kotlin/Native.
I meant that it gives Kotlin adopters the sense that there is no vendor lock-in on the code they write, while at the same time they keep a strong bind on the present and future market IDE for Kotlin (if a competitor appears, Jetbrains will be first to market for everything Kotlin so they will have a persistent edge), capturing with the IDE the dollars of those who seriously plan to develop for Kotlin.
The fact that they have a freemium model is irrelevant to that goal of owing the Kotlin IDE space.
The free offering you mention is used both for funnelling or for having customers do the market segmentation themselves, as there are customers that want to pay for everyone in the team, there are customers who want to pay for only some of members of the team and those who do not want to pay for anyone in the team.
> The next thing is also fairly straightforward: we expect Kotlin to drive the sales of IntelliJ IDEA. We’re working on a new language, but we do not plan to replace the entire ecosystem of libraries that have been built for the JVM. So you’re likely to keep using Spring and Hibernate, or other similar frameworks, in your projects built with Kotlin. And while the development tools for Kotlin itself are going to be free and open-source, the support for the enterprise development frameworks and tools will remain part of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, the commercial version of the IDE. And of course the framework support will be fully integrated with Kotlin.
I don't see it getting wide adoption, but it's not bad for open source. But compared with C# (which is basically Delphi as it should originally have been, by the same designer) - nah.
Viral expansion of any tool depends on (pardon the pandemic reference) a super spreader event or 10.
Success needs:
1 A killer app. Pascal/Turbo Pascal, Email/nascent Internet, VisiCalc/Apple II, 123/IBM PC.
2 decade long over night success like Python
I acquired my "10K hour" badge with Pascal in the late 70s (CDC Cyber 6600) and Mid 80s (PC) and then again with Perl (late 80s to early 2Ks) when each of these
peaked. Coming back to the 2015+ versions (Lazarus / Perl 5.24+) of both was nostalgic but the communities were in the backwaters of programming due to viral success of some many others.
A compelling event would have to happen to elevate them again. It could happen: Something pushed Ada to almost triple its "popularity" ( to < 1%.) According to PYPL (https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html) in the last year.
It will get it, eventually. It can produce native executables without cross compiling on ARM systems too, which is a huge selling point to me. Think Raspberry PI, other small ARM boards, etc. and the PinePhone too.
C# does not compile to native apps by default unless you're using dotnet core or whatever it is called. Powerful language sure, but there is definitely a bit of a divide between the languages just because of that even if they have a similar syntax and high level design
Well, Microsoft did and do make money from selling development tools and programming language products. Sun of course nearly went bust and were taken over by Oracle. So, maybe not good examples?
Java had a massive push by Sun.
If you have a old java codebase, it is easy to "wrap" around a big proxy and continue to expand it in Java, without learning a new language.
Language library is quite well optimized.
I like Pascal but its scope rules are Crazy compared to C/Java/C#, nerveless Pascal compiler is reported faster than Java one
> I like Pascal but its scope rules are Crazy compared to C/Java/C#, nerveless Pascal compiler is reported faster than Java one
Admittedly a long time since I used Pascal proper, but my recollection (and a quick search seems to confirm) that its scope rules are "simply" lexical scoping. Variables are visible only within the area they are declared and not outside, and variables can shadow variables from a higher level. So a global variable can become shadowed by a procedure variable. That's pretty much the same as the other languages use.
