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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

358 points ofalkaed | 1 comments | 11 Oct 25 22:16 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop something new based on its ideas.
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Havoc ◴[12 Oct 25 09:40 UTC] No.45556825[source]▶
Pascal/Delphi - especially in the educational context.

Crazy fast compiler so doesn't frustrate trial & erroring students, decent type system without the wildness of say rust and all the basic programming building blocks you want students to grasp are present without language specific funkiness.

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le-mark ◴[12 Oct 25 11:54 UTC] No.45557529[source]▶
Iirc Delphi didn’t have threads, sockets, or OS integration (signals, file watching …). So it wasn’t suited to systems programming ie servers and services. It nailed gui applications, and that was a lot. Maybe freepascal has threads and sockets but imo it was too late.
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1. rs186 ◴[12 Oct 25 13:13 UTC] No.45558018[source]▶
Eh, sounds like that wouldn't be a problem for education purposes as the parent suggests? You need to be doing some really specific to leverage threads/file watching. And people probably use C to teach threads anyway.

Of course, being a good teaching language probably doesn't make the language popular or even survive. Python is so widely used not necessarily because it's simple to learn but because of its ecosystem.