Hi all,
Realistically the game was lost when Anders Hejlsberg was poached from Borland to Microsoft and Microsoft then allocated huge resources to C#.
For Delphi to survive as a commercial mainstream language it would instead have had to be sold to Microsoft, perhaps with Microsoft acquiring Borland. I can understand why Borland did not want to do this existentially fatal move , but the consequence was loss of market share for Delphi and a slow demise.
Anyway, in the near future with agentic Large Language Models (LLMs) likely to autonomously do most of the world’s future coding, and with much of this code either unseen or unintelligible to humans, past and current coding languages really may not matter. Software may well be mostly designed with specifications and parameters set in human languages delivered in prompts to LLMs, which will then autonomously write the necessary machine code, having invented their own intermediate languages if and where necessary.
It’s going to be very different future!
Cheers,
Martin