Programmer productivity. As long as this is the bottleneck in determining market success of a product, this tradeoff will continue.
It's because today isn't about programmer productivity.
It's about enabling teams to work together without tripping over their own feet and killing the business.
So much complexity to solve essentially what is a human problem.
It takes 5 people to do the job of 1 back then, and that's what the industry wants. No one would trust an individual.
Too much money flowed into this industry, leading to waste, as it became clearly a pillar of the future.
That's the entire point of "soft"ware. Otherwise there would be no point on doing on a CPU what could be made on an integrated circuit 1000 times faster.
A single guy writing whatever code they decided to do, may create a good program. But as requirements change, and the ownership gets passed on, it quickly becomes a nightmare to modify or refactor.
Good code made in SlowScript® by a team based on consensus on architecture and coding style has more potential for success as a product than the fast and optimized spaghetti code made by the best hacker in the world.
In the "golden era" computers were more or less advanced calculators. Now we (as a population) expect to give entertainment and give advice about our lifestyle, like we do with smartwatches or fitness devices.
That's a lot more complicated than writing text or inputting numbers into a grid
I always think about Lindy effect [1] in this context: the life expectancy of a technology, idea or (in our case) a societal habit is proportional to its current age. It follows, then, that the idea of a multi-purpose computing device may also wear off in certain areas of life, or for certain types of people. Not always, not everywhere is there a need for complex or complicated devices or systems. There will always be people who seek or prefer a simpler, quieter life that involves as little technology as possible.
What's really interesting is that many of these people seem to have a remarkably deep understanding of technology, and great skills [2]. Possibly because of this knowledge, they're really clear (or, pedantic :) about what they don't need.
In the end, though, I've come to think that this may be more of a simple psychological preference (for less stimulation) than a rationalized choice. Who knows.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
2: Some of the people I really look up to: http://collapseos.org/, http://joeyh.name/, https://sassenrath.com/
Everything you ever loved about Delphi 7, but with a ton of modernization. LGPL, too!
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.
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.
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.
"Microsoft will acquire Skype, the leading Internet communications company, for $8.5 billion"
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.
Also there are other Pascal to JavaScript transpilers, which use other dialects of Object Pascal, such as DWScript and Smart Pascal.
Not so surprising, given the backgrounds of the key designers of Go, I feel. Griesemer even got his PhD under Mössenböck and Wirth.
"A Programming Language for Vector Computers"
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.42....
As a user on an hypothetical Oberon workstation, I would rather have Active Oberon than Oberon-07 as official systems language.