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.

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.

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.

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.

Still, a free for personal use model is better than none. Hopefully, we will soon have some adaptation from Llama 2 that matches it, fairly soon.

This wasn't the case in 20-25 years ago when stuff would outdate real fast. 90% of people don't really need new computers.

Today, we have endless options. But most are not as comprehensive as what Delphi is/was. I'd rather write a UI in Delphi/Lazarus (LCL/VCL/FireMonkey) than any other UI framework even today. The trouble is, I don't want to use it for anything else other than the UI.

UI design and data binding should be a simple mouse driven activity. That's adequate for most designs. Why do we need code? It's like expecting everyone to use LaTeX than RTF. Sure, it's more flexible, but an overkill.

I wish there are more integrations with modern languages than 20 types of grids with overlapping functionality. I'd write my code in a language appropriate for the task and just use Lazarus for the UI. Currently, Python (Python4Delphi) seems to be the only one with components for that, but even that needs more polish (and largely stagnant for over 20 years). Most I can do is do shared libraries and call in.

Netbeans GUI builder was more powerful than VB's in some ways but just made simple things complicated.