jules22

Must be his browser settings, his may not be putting tabs to sleep. I am under 3 GB on a Linux machine with just browsing.

No. It's the fact that it is a great 12 year old machine that makes it notable. I would not be surprised if it was usable as a 20 year old machine. These things are comfortable and they last.

I got mine for $100, about 4-5 years ago. Only 1 USB port seems to work. Great keyboard, only 720p screen, did not upgrade the HDD. Works great as a secondary machine. I expect to use it for at least another 5 years, likely more. I love old machines and how repairable they were.

I wish they would not make the new laptops that tight and thin. I like low weight, but would not mind a little thickness, if I can open it and clean it easily, change the paste, upgrade easily, have external battery, more room for venting and so on. These are very practical features.

On a related note, I just don't understand the madness of having battery inside the laptop in gaming laptops these days. The heat kills them. These are mostly portable desktops and I can't find any new gaming laptops that have external batteries anymore so that I can use them on just external power. In the rare occasion, it ends up as a very premium feature. These things were basic features in the past.

Even Visual Basic for DOS had a TUI designer. Wasn't addressed in the article.

I used it. The user experience is not remotely close to Delphi, but it has WYSIWYG. The closest Python had to Delphi was Boa Constructor, but it stalled quickly, decades ago.

VB5/6 had native code compilers. Performance wise, the gap was reduced. But it still was only object based and not full OOP, VCL was much better in all respects, so were the GUI builders. The component ecosystem was much better, despite having a much smaller user base. I prefer not to use Object Pascal today, but back then, it was superior to using VC++ or VB.

Same. I learnt VB because VC++ with MFC was too complex for what I needed it for then. Hated VB after seeing Delphi.

I liked Delphi's anchors. They were extremely simple, visually defined, and met all of my layout needs.

> Of course there can be language extensions like C++ Builder did for C++ but they'd need to maintain their own compiler (or fork).

This is exactly what I hope would happen, except this time with Rust or Go. They don't need to integrate fully. I am not hoping for the ability to write Go/Rust for GUI code, just to be able to call into them without the clunky foreign functions.

I leave out Pascal now because besides the GUI part, the value isn't there anymore. The language is archaic otherwise.

> Personally i get the impression that Visual Basic and Delphi's language features were added in tandem with the underlying framework (if not deciding first how the framework and IDE features will look like and then deciding on the language features to support those) whereas modern UI stuff are made with whatever the target language has in place.

I agree. But the features stabilized, more or less. IDE experiences have not gotten better in a long while. It's not much of a moving target.

VB6 was primitive compared to what Delphi gave us. It had live design time data binding, visual form inheritance etc. VB and VC++ were primitive compared to that. VCL vs MFC? No contest. The API was powerful, fast, great to extend by inheritance, best in class layout management. There were about 8000 third party components at web sites like Delphi Super Page. Half of those were free, rest were affordably priced for commercial use.

Much of the 90s experience lives on in FPC/Lazarus, but it did not get much better after that, and few use it. I wish they aligned themselves with a more popular language like Rust or Go for a more cohesive experience, while keeping Object Pascal (built with IDE experience in mind).

I still prefer the GUI building experience in Delphi 6/7 than anything that was produced since then. C#/Winforms is fine, it was designed by the same person - Anders Hejlsberg, but I wanted something native.

It's unbelievable that something modern like Flutter still fails to capture the design convenience of Delphi, from decades ago. Yes, the design markup is great, but I don't even want to look at it most of the time.

The later Swing/SWT editors never came close. Even Qt, which was inspired by it, never provided the component market experience of Delphi, and it was much more bloated in runtimes.

I fell in love with GUI design with Delphi, but otherwise hated it since.

Sure, not in the traditional sense. Since it does not make small standalone libraries, even though possible, I would not make a native extension with it. But juliacall works fine for Python and R. Quite seamless.

What does a modern Fortran bring that Julia does not? Small binaries?

Nim/Julia, IMO.

However....

Nim is unlikely to go mainstream. It's not the next Rust and not for technical reasons.

Julia won't budge Python out of the top slot anytime soon, although it should in many scenarios past simple scripting.

With the right distro, 4GB with just a HDD is quite fine for Chromebook style usage.