I had a very similar path starting with dBASE III Plus.

As you say the productivity it (xBASE/FoxPro/Clipper) offered was remarkable. One of the tools that I really wish I had was a FoxPro/Clipper compiler that took a subset of the language (general purpose stuff and screen functionality) and compiled it to either C or Go with ncurses. Who knows, I might have AI help me build one.

Look for Harbour project on github

Absolutely correct! We've lost a lot along the way.

Kudos to you! Looks very nice and well thought out. I was working on a native Windows tool for data exploration of SQLite but I shelved it.

If you don't mind my asking -- what language and toolkit do you use?

I can certainly see a lot of benefits from a team oriented web-based dashboard.

I'm building a site auditing tool with a pluggable metrics pipeline. It's implemented in Java using Javalin for API, OkHttp for fetching, and jsoup for parsing. I'm experimenting with an event sink model for metrics aggregation.

Still early, but it's definitely fun and interesting.

That could be a lot of fun to play with, especially if it has PowerVM.

POWER 8 with AS/400 AFAIK had PowerVM as mandatory requirement (runs with VIOS)

Very cool! What compilers and interpreters are available? I know that rexx wasn't available at the time that the open source vm/370 was released. Has the community found a way to add rexx?

Interesting! I never imagined that would be a thing. Thought that zerks were only for grease.

Yes, you can build cross-platform GUI apps with Delphi. However, that requires using Firemonkey (FMX). If you build a GUI app using VCL on Delphi, it's limited to Windows. If you build an app with Lazarus and LCL, you CAN have it work cross-platform.

I thought the point was that Windows apps will run on Linux under Wine (and macOS?) so using VCL is a cross-platform GUI development environment.

I made the clarification because the comment I replied to mentioned Android, iOS, and macOS. There are many who used Delphi before FMX appeared and I thought it would be helpful to point out that VCL only makes Windows executables.

You might as well use Lazarus and LCL. It'll give the best of all worlds.

"A lot of code can be pessimized by golfing instruction counts"

Can you explain what this phrase means?

An old approach to micro-optimization is to look at the generated assembly, and trying to achieve the same thing with fewer instructions. However, modern CPUs are able to execute multiple instructions in parallel (out-of-order execution), and this mechanism relies on detecting data dependencies between instructions.

It means that the shorter sequence of instructions is not necessarily faster, and can in fact make the CPU stall unnecessarily.

The fastest sequence of instructions is the one that makes the best use of the CPU’s resources.

I’ve done this: I had a hot loop and I discovered that I could reduce instruction counts by adding a branch inside the loop. Definitely slower, which I expected, but it’s worth measuring.

Sounds nice! I could see where that could be simultaneously rewarding and frustrating. Best of luck to you.