Yes, but not compared with just about anything else. I used to make some of my living as a Delphi consultant, but I had to give it up as you couldn't make any money doing it, particularly when compared with C#, C++ and Java.
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.
I am betting it is going the Delphi way.
- 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.
And the active role to make it a InteliJ language for most part, withdrawing support for Eclipse.
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.
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.
https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2011/08/why-jetbrains-need...
> 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.
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.
https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php?topic=52217.0
I still remain a total newbie but that's not because of Lazarus.
Microsoft and Sun did not. So they could both give their products away for free and open source them, plus keep people working on those products.
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.