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Comment by huytersd | Hacker News Reader

It happens every now and then. Could be as simple as nostalgia.

Like Delphi, FreePascal and Lazarus, though less often for those three than for IrfanView, and those three get a good number of sneers by modern ignoramuses, each time. The joke is on them, due to the amount of late night and weekend work (unpaid, often) that many of them have to pull, and tamely accept and try to justify, to save their egos and paychecks.

"The emperor has no clothes" kind of thing ...

And nowadays, layoffs, too ...

Delphi kicked ass. Though, looking back, it didn't have hash tables at your fingertips like modern languages. I really can't imagine writing code without hashmaps anymore. Did that ever get added, and in a convenient way that doesn't require declaring a new object each time?

You could use TDictionary. It has been around since 15 years.

Sadly by 2009 I'd moved on to a new job and didn't have much opportunity to use it. It didn't even have generics when I used it last. Looks like you have to allocate and free them manually though, which is less than I hoped for. I rather like the scripting languages where they are part of the syntax and seamlessly decode from JSON.

No true Delphiman would say that ;)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Good question.

nurettin replied, sibling comment.

But it's not difficult to write your own for simple map types at least, like with strings as the keys. Generic maps would be harder.

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