It's an interesting issue, personally I wouldn't look at someones employment history, and working with legacy tools/environments, as a black mark, but it could be indicative of someone who simply refuses to move to new technology.
I've also hired some younger people who were actually interested in picking it up because they were keen to learn anything they could, and you can learn plenty from Delphi despite it's warts.
Over time I've described myself as suffering a kind Stockholm Syndrome w/ Delphi now, and some of the guys on my team have flat out refused to learn it for maintaining some of our systems.
And Turbo Pascal was CHEAP, I think in terms of what you got for your $50? I can't remember the original retail price, you couldn't beat it. Hell, if you kept your eye out you could get copies of Delphi, / Delphi 3 for the cost of a "introduction to Delphi" book which almost always came with a standard license of Delphi.
Hobbyist Borland was the best Borland. A really amazing company that fully embraced those original tinkerers... Enterprise <X>, full vomit, but hey, that's where they got to charge many thousands per seat, so you can't really blame them.
Up until Delphi 5 or 6 the cheapest Delphi would be just $100, it wasn't until Borland became Inprise and chased that big $$$ enterprise money that their prices skyrocketed.
Turbo C was actually about the same price, I paid £32 I believe, and then paid £50 for the upgrade to Borland C++ 3.1 (all as a single purchase), vs paying the £200 or so for C++ on it's own. I remember it arriving the day after in a huge 'crate' full of books.
For Delphi it is a combo of the Indy project (IdHttp), and superobject (probably other json parsers too but superobject is quick and fairly solid).
However, given I've yet to find Delphi code that straight up compiles in Lazarus/FreePascal, you probably have your work cut out for you, but if you google for [superobject/indy] for Lazarus, others have started those hikes, and you may find there are working versions of one, or possibly both of them. I've never looked.
Yeah, this... You can have circular dependencies, as long as it is in the implementation only. Takes some thought on interface definitions to avoid these things. Sometimes it's a real pain.
There's also the issue that when you split out units, and then you have a user who wants to consume say, a library you've written, you then have to document "Ok, to use this you have to use X, Y, and Z units for type definitions"
A better approach is to have a single "entry point" unit if you will, that simply re-declares all of the types from the X,Y,Z units, so that when you go to use the code you've written, you only have to import W, and get all the type defs already. (Hard to explain what I'm talking about I guess)
Mate I've got a project whose first lines of code were struck back in the 80s in Turbo pascal. Your "continuously deprecated" argument doesn't hold a lot of water from where I sit... In terms of actual language features/changes that have caused deprecated status, those are very few and far between. Maybe some VCL database controls, for sure it would have sucked to have built stuff relying on interbase, but that is not a language/compiler feature, that was CodeGear EOL that particular project (I had to manage the exit strategy on one of our projects where it relied on that crapware)
Even library developers are pretty good at pumping out versions of their libs that have support for even Delphi 5. I know of at least 2 people who are still doing windows dev on Delphi 5 or maybe 7, I can't recall.. the very definition of "from my cold dead fingers".
Suffice to say if you were one of those real hold-outs, not updating to the latest.. you wouldn't have generics, dynamic arrays, lambdas/anonymous functions, and you would probably struggle to grab much code written in the last decade and compile it straight up.. but that would probably be the case for a number of languages that have had core features added to them over time.
The fact that the system is proprietary certainly is an issue, but every install always ships with all the source code of the RTL, VCL, and clear instructions on how to compile it with a "you're on your own now" sense of adventure.
The one negative I've found with Lazarus... And this is purely if you were someone coming from a Delphi background, or were planning on Lazarus being your "get out of jail free" card if [Embarcadero/(whoever owns it now)] decides to stop updating Delphi (and even then you could probably manage it's lack of updates for years, hell I stayed on Delphi 2007 for a good 8 or 9 years after XE, XE1, XE2 et al had been out).. Anyways, back to my point, the one major negative I've found with Lazarus is you simply can not take Delphi code, and compile it straight in Lazarus... There are many many many very subtle differences. Totally fine and understandable, but if you were planning on taking the attitude of "Stuff Delphi, lets take our 400k line project and move to Lazarus", you are going to have a bad time.
Having said that I've done a couple of my own projects at home in Lazarus. It's fine, it feels dated, going back to the original Delphi / VB style of RAD tool with form designer/code editor as floating windows etc. The intellisense leaves something to be desired, but I can't be too critical because it's not like I'm putting my hand up to contribute to the project. If you look at what you get for what you pay for, it's quite literally amazing.
> It's fine, it feels dated, going back to the original Delphi / VB style of RAD tool with form designer/code editor as floating windows etc.
Note that if you install the "anchordockingdsgn" and the "dockedformeditor" packages you will get a UI that uses a single toplevel window with all the previously floating windows being docked inside it (you can still un-dock them) and a form editor that is inside the window (without the "dockedformeditor" you can still get the single window for the IDE but form editing will happen in floating forms).
Personally i prefer the floating windows UI as i overlap windows a lot (and i'm used to it - also i have a dedicated virtual desktop for coding which helps), but there are enough people who prefer a single window UI that this should work without issues these days (it used to be somewhat very unpolished at the past, like installing the package and having a shotgun blast in the IDE panels :-P so you'd spend a few minutes moving and resizing the panels in sane places).
Fidonet as the original electronic mail package, Door Games (BRE, cross-bbs wars, wow), ANSI Art, damn, it was really fun. I loved my time dialing into the local BBS's.
It was interesting watching some of the larger ones in my area turn into the most successful ISPs at the time (and get consumed later by the much larger national ones).
It inspired me to run my own, and while I only had the one line, and a very simple set of RemoteAccess screens, the experience taught me a hell of a lot about computers in general.
Anyone who is telling you they have cracked the parimutuel pools, and "here's how to do it", is trying to sell you something else. Anyone who has actually cracked the parimutuel pools knows how they work, and that if you share your "tips", or selections, you only serve to diminish your own returns, so you are not going to do it.
Indeed. This is the origin of the expression "break a leg." At the track, you could never wish someone else good luck because their good luck will cost you money. Instead, you wish their horse breaks a leg so he'll be eliminated, moving the money in his pool to yours if you win.
It's an interesting issue, personally I wouldn't look at someones employment history, and working with legacy tools/environments, as a black mark, but it could be indicative of someone who simply refuses to move to new technology.
I've also hired some younger people who were actually interested in picking it up because they were keen to learn anything they could, and you can learn plenty from Delphi despite it's warts.
Over time I've described myself as suffering a kind Stockholm Syndrome w/ Delphi now, and some of the guys on my team have flat out refused to learn it for maintaining some of our systems.