I have been thinking about that and there is an issue with it; Delphi (and VB) where written in a time when devs paid a lot for software tools. Besides some niches (embedded) that is not really the case anymore. You expect to pay a few $10 at most in total if that. And a lot of people (but that might be the HN/Reddit echo chamber) demand all to be OSS as well they work with. Making 'a modern Delphi' is a lot of work; years of it. And much of that time is not 'fun', it's hard work polishing little parts and having user test groups feedback on it and polishing it some more. The time that you could be Borland seems gone (unfortunately imho) and i'm not sure how you can make the kind of polished tool you are talking about in the current climate. Maybe someone else here has some different views though.

There are companies trying it though,

https://anvil.works/

https://www.outsystems.com/platform/

JetBrains is probably a good example of a "Borland" like company.

Outside HN/Reddit bubble that are plenty of companies that are willing to pay for software, the supermarket cashier doesn't take pull requests.

Also, the back to native focus on mobile platforms, including Google having to integrate Android apps on ChromeOS, might make it less relevant, given that native IDEs do offer some Delphi like experience.

JetBrains never did any rapid UI IDE like Delphi did. In fact, all their IDEs are in Swing, which is a mess. I'd totally love having CLion/PyCharm with Qt UI designer, but it's not going to happen.

The easiest time I had writing GUIs was when I used PyQT. I designed the UI in Qt Designer, loaded it in the python code, set the bindings and voila, it was working.

Btw Visual Basic continues to exist under Visual Basic.NET and if you stick to the basics you could learn to write C# GUI programs pretty quickly.

I agree writing GUIs by hand is very counter-productive.

They have a GUI designer for Swing.

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/components-of-the-gui-de...

And integrate with Scene Builder for JavaFX.

JavaBeans are the Java version of VCL components.

Qt doesn't have a component eco-system like Java or even .NET enjoy.

The company behind Qt is still trying to sell QML to C++ developers, looking from the set of talks at Qt World Summit.

Outsystems and Jetbrains are these examples but on the other hand they are not; they are 'old'; they both exist since 2000 and at that time pushing into the market was a lot easier. I was more thinking of a company starting now, to which I'll check out Anvil.Works. There are more new companies working in the space, for sure, but they all miss the breadth that Borland had (they really had a lot of cash and developers on hand in those days).

But yes, Outsystems (I worked with them and their product quite a lot in the past) could be considered a Delphi. But still not modern; it's rather painful building apps/sites with it that people seem to want.

Jetbrains can be considered a Borland; I didn't think of that because I consider them more in the space of 'low level' programming tools (which, like you say, includes Delphi functionality, but a modern Delphi wouldn't be like the old Delphi; it would need a lot more innovation).

Anvil founder here!

The crucial difference between Outsystems(/Bubble/etc) and Anvil is that Outsystems tries to be a "no-code" environment, and we think that's a mistake (or at least, a different market).

Delphi and Visual Basic proved that writing code isn't the problem - code is the best way to tell a computer what to do. But writing code in five different languages to produce "Hello World" on the web...now that will slow you down.

(Count 'em: JS, HTML, CSS, backend eg Ruby/Python, SQL. We do everything in Python, which gets you going much faster. We just got back from PyCon UK, where among other things we got an 8-year-old building database-backed web apps in an afternoon. That's the sort of thing that used to happen with VB/Delphi.)

Thanks; that sounds very interesting. I will check it out tonight.

Was the talk recorded?

There's a healthy market of RAD/lowcode tools similar to Delphi these days. One example is Mendix: https://www.mendix.com/application-platform-as-a-service/

Full visual development, runs on a scala runtime, can be deployed (visually) on cloudfoundry, docker/kubernetes, etc.

Thanks for the heads up, one more for my list. :)

Funnily enough I was looking at the title and just thinking in 25 years time I will still be programming in the same three languages C, Pascal/Delphi and SQL I learnt 25 years ago.

Interesting. Can you elaborate more?

Imagine WebComponents finally becoming mature and having a programming environment for RAD on the Web, using toolbox with drop-in components for doing application development.

There are already some attempts at it, for example https://anvil.works/