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Comment by iagovar | Hacker News Reader

A bit offtopic, but I recently discovered Lazarus, and I was pleasantly reminded that the language I learned in high school is still kicking.

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Pascal was my first programming language at University (circa 2016). Alas in 2018 they succumbed to student feedback (university admin was big on that) complaining about learning a "dead language".

Missing the point that it is a brilliant teaching language for a beginner to learn fundamental concepts.

Even better than that, it also runs natively on Raspberry Pi, so you can go down at bare metal on embedded projects.

You mean ObjPascal or the IDE?

Lazarus is the IDE. Free Pascal is the language. Both go together in Raspberry Pi without a problem. Create beautiful GUI that can run on touchscreen too. Use a $50 3.5 inch touchscreen + $35 RPi and you can have a beautiful IoT doing whatever you want.

Delphi is also a commercial product still - I use it every day :-)

Can I ask what kind of projects you work on as a Delphi developer today? I loved using it back in the day but I understand the market for it is quite slim now.

I spent two decades as a Delphi contractor. Not doing it anymore, but I still see a lot of control software for industrial machinery and lab equipment (at least those made in EU), POS and kiosk software as well as custom ERP and ERP style software.

I am currently working on NIR spectrometer and I am actually thinking about using Lazarus for driving touch screen instead of web based dashboard.

For example this company uses Delphi on their software products,

https://www.lab-services.nl/en/home

In Germany, there are still conferences with Delphi contents (EKON 24 and BASTA), and some magazines have occasional Delphi content.

A lot of medical software was written in Delphi and still going - it was written by Doctors and grew.

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