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helloworld

I forgot that Delphi was sort of a mash-up of Visual Basic and Pascal. Two great tastes, I guess.

Are there contemporary products -- for building mobile and/or web apps -- that are similarly easy to use?

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You should check out Lazarus. It's basically open source Delphi and cross platform, write once, compile anywhere.

http://www.lazarus-ide.org

And lazarus (ie. free Pascal) will compile Turbo Pascal code without a lot of effort. Was quite amazed to resurrect a discrete event simulation I first wrote on VAX Pascal, ported to Turbo Pascal (and wrote my own replacement to the FORTRAN SPURT libraries) and then used a fair bit till about 1990. Fired it up (from the 5 1/4 disks copied some years ago) and had it running in a few minutes, except that it had a range error that I oddly never spotted with Turbo Pascal that had to be fixed first. (And my link with Delphi, applied for a job, didn't get it but they saw Pascal on my resume and said, we'll we've got some Delphi code that needs extending...)

No, Delphi back in the day was like VS/C# now... or, rather, the other way around, given that MS snatched Delphi's lead dev* to make C#.

*Anders Hejlsberg -- who also worked to bring us TypeScript.

C# and Windows Forms was a spiritual successor to Delphi in many ways, IMO. E.g. VCL had TObject <- TComponent <- TControl, WinForms had Object <- Component <- Control ...

Event(Sender: TObject) type of thing is everywhere in C# now.

Also, to add to your point: The TDataset MVC architecture was light years ahead of its time:

TVisualControl -> TDataSource -> TDatasetDescendant

Everything just fits in snugly.

Whoever thought of that architecture at Borland in the early days (1990s) deserves a legacy trophy truly!

You can build native multi-platform apps with Delphi. The free Community Edition supports, Windows, macOS, iOS and Android development. With third party component stacks you can build and transpile Object Pascal to JavaScript with Delphi too.

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