Marco van de Voort wrote:
In our previous episode, Mark Morgan Lloyd said:
But I suppose all this begs the question: if one decides not to use
Object Pascal, what are the viable alternatives?
While hobbywise, I won't let go of FPC (and Wirthian languages) that
quickly, professionally it is different.
Currently, for me it is not really a problem (small company, my preference
has the most weight), but there was some discussion a while back of hiring
more programmers and cooperating with certain other (SCADA like) companies,
so there was some discussion.
The SCADA package we inherited was written in a bastard mix of three
versions of MS C, plus a spreadsheet in MS Pascal and assembler
interfaces to an IBM communications controller. I replaced it by Delphi
code with PostgreSQL as backend, and am completely impenitent.
In my case the only viable alternative is C++, but I'm somewhat embedded
with a bit of realtime requirement. Sometimes I think it would be easier
even now, but I have previous MFC experience, and that still scares me a
bit. (IOW, if you go back to C++, what will you use as GUI?)
In my previous job, I was more standard business apps, and then the only
viable alternative is C# IMHO.
One doesn't have to like it, but if I'm leaving Pascal because it is too
tiring to defend being in a niche, then you won't pick up some other niche,
and the above are (to me) the only viable choices.
But is MS really committed to C# and .NET, and if not could it drown
Mono etc. out of spite? Which leaves C++, which as I see it has the same
issues as Object Pascal except that lots more people use it.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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