Ask HN: Are people still using Pascal?
Our main product is in Delphi, a B2B CRUD-ish application, with a 60% market share in our niche. We're crucial to daily operations of many local branches of well-known global businesses.<p>These days it's obvious the years of lost momentum is taking a toll. The language hasn't evolved much and is showing its age in many areas. The IDE is far behind Visual Studio in terms of code completion and similar help. It's also been difficult hiring  developers.<p>We've looked at moving to the web, but none of the front-end frameworks and tools we've seen so far get anywhere close to the ease of Delphi when it comes to making decent looking user interfaces with nontrivial functionality that doesn't silently break in random weird ways from one day to the next.<p>Also, if you want something in between a full CRM and "assembly level" database access, Delphi has some powerful libraries and components.<p>To give some perspective, we've got hundreds of businesses with many thousands of users, many large modules which constantly evolve, we have tons of custom integrations per customer, including custom data entry windows/screens. The largest customer has 25 integrations, 20 of them entirely custom including non-trivial new user interfaces, and got onboarded in less than a year from signing the contract. This with a team of 7 devs total and zero hired manpower. I'm not sure we could have gotten this far with such few developers with any other tool/platform.<p>But as I said, things are changing. So far we're moving the "backend" stuff to .Net/C#. Via RPC and message queues we can implement pieces in .Net while keeping the frontend in Delphi for now. We'll probably move the front end at some point once we find something suitable.