Serious question: Can you make "Netflix money", er, "FAANG money", as a Lazarus developer?

No, but all those people making "Netflix money" aren't really changing technology, are they? I'd argue FAANG is stagnating it, and telling themselves differently.

I guess if you want to make gobs of cash, fine. You could also just go into finance and make more than FAANG money if you're talented enough.

Facebook is a major contributor (sometimes the primary one) to many famous open-source projects: Linux, mercurial, MySQL, React, jemalloc, PyTorch, GraphQL, and probably several others I’m not thinking of.

They’re also one of the top AI/ML research institutions in the world with a huge chunk of the papers published at top conferences.

Similar statements are also true of Google.

I'd argue that Microsoft, Google and Apple have enabled massive growth in technology. New uses for OSs, new places for them to run, and ways to make starting far more accessible/collaborative.

Even if there is 2 step forwards, one step back, the overall benefit of options available due to the vast number of people contributing their creativity is only possible due to these companies.

They enabled new users for computers, and killed desktop computing in the process. I don't think the trade off is with it.

Skype was originally written in delphi.

"Microsoft will acquire Skype, the leading Internet communications company, for $8.5 billion"

No but that isn't because of Lazarus itself but because "Netflix/FAANG" doesn't use it as what it does isn't really in their business interests. Lazarus is mainly about making desktop applications. It can do web, etc but it isn't really a focus and you lose most of the visual functionality anyway (yeah ok, you can set up URL routing via the object inspector and connect DB components together, but 99% of the work is done via code anyway so it doesn't provide something better than what you'd find in more popular tools).

There's a JS transpiler in the works for FreePascal, iirc.

AFAIK pas2js doesn't fully support the full runtime library yet and i think the language isn't completely implemented. IMO the wasm target will be more interesting and was merged into the main branch earlier this year, though i don't know how usable it is.

Either way those are things that allow you to use Free Pascal code in the web on the client side, but they aren't really "Lazarus" things. Once the full RTL can be used via pas2js or wasm, it could be possible to make a web-based backend for LCL but that would feel kinda alien as you'd essentially be embedding a desktop application inside a web page.

It is also possible to make new form (object) designers for a new type of form (object) that acts more like a Flash page or something like that, but that would require a lot of work. On the other hand it might make making mobile apps better too.

Pas2JS already exists in the Free Pascal world. You can make applications with it. https://wiki.freepascal.org/pas2js

Also there are other Pascal to JavaScript transpilers, which use other dialects of Object Pascal, such as DWScript and Smart Pascal.

Maybe everyone trying to make FAANG money is what drove tech into this mess.

google developed golang instead of improving pascal, so you probably can't. the two languages have surprisingly similar goals.

> the two languages have surprisingly similar goals.

Not so surprising, given the backgrounds of the key designers of Go, I feel. Griesemer even got his PhD under Mössenböck and Wirth.

Griesemer PhD's is related to Oberon.

"A Programming Language for Vector Computers"

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.42....

I've read it. I "binged" on pretty much everything published by Wirth and Mössenböck's groups at one point. His work on Oberon really underlines the point that it's unsurprising that Go has similarities in terms of design goals.

Indeed, although the pursuit for minimalism is where my appreciation for Wirth's work kind of winds down.

As a user on an hypothetical Oberon workstation, I would rather have Active Oberon than Oberon-07 as official systems language.

I do think he sometimes went too far, but I think the attitude was admirable in as much as it was driven not so much by opposition to these features but in recognition of his own lack of understanding of how to make various features efficient. Which made the languages less viable in their "pure" states for day to day use, certainly, but also great starting points.

I wish more language designers would at least think about simplicity and implementation consequences, even if I too would prefer to work in a language where after thinking about that they still implement hard to optimise features.

My favourite language is Ruby, pretty much the anti-thesis of a Wirthian language, and certainly not Go, so I'm not saying all of the parts carried over to Go are necessarily things I agree with either.

At the same time, Ruby is full of things I wish had been better specified or left out, and often I get the feeling that if Matz had been forced to at least consider simplicity more when Ruby started out, it'd be a cleaner, better language for it. E.g. for the most part the Ruby grammar makes for a language that is nice to write, but it has so many dark, and horrible corners that does nothing to make Ruby pleasant that are simply there because nobody cared enough simplicity. Favourite example: "% x " may look like a syntax error, but it's the quoted string "x" - space is a valid quote character; if that isn't messed up, "%\nx\n" is also valid and produces the quoted string "x"... LF is also a valid quote character... Contrived Ruby hello world:

    x=%
    hello world
    
    puts x

(mind the whitespace - put a space after that "%" and it's suddenly a syntax error because the string suddenly ends at the space after "hello"; fun times)