Having used all Borland compilers since Turbo Pascal 3 all the way up to around the first set of Delphi versions, and a couple of UNIX Pascal compilers as well, I wonder what is so hard for real world stuff.
There are so many things that were better in its field, domain or niche but simple got washed out in History. It was only the other day someone commented Rails, despite its similarity in concept and execution, it is still not as good as good old Enterprise Objects Framework from NeXT.
http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/page570/page571/page573/p...
What they miss in regard to Delphi is proper AOT to native code capabilities, something that they should have supported (from my point of view) since version 1.0. Java had it via commercial JDKs (which only enterprises cared about), .NET via NGEN, mono aot and some research stuff like CosmOS, Singularity or Midori.
However now 20 years later they are finally realising that must be an option, but that is mostly thanks to the competion from Go, Rust, Swift and friends than anything else.
Interesting that you mention EOF, it eventually became WebObjects (in Java) and it was due to NeXT / Sun collaboration that J2EE was born. Many Java bashers don't realise how much influence Objective-C had in the Java ecosystem, in language features, language runtime, and yes J2EE.
Regarding things being washed out of history, check out on Burroughs, VMS, Solo Pascal, Mesa, Multics, PL.8 for examples of systems programming before C was at all relevant outside Bell Labs walls, the Xerox PARS Workstations namely Interlisp-D, Mesa, Mesa/Cedar, Smalltalk or Wirths linage of Modula-2 and Oberon derived work based on Xerox PARC work.
Unfortunely computer history isn't something that most computing degrees spend time on.
>What they miss in regard to Delphi is proper AOT to native code capabilities
May be I am just a fan of Pascal. Which for some reason most developers hate and opt for PL with more C like syntax.
>Unfortunely computer history isn't something that most computing degrees spend time on.
Yes. We end up not knowing the how and why it was like that in the first place. And ends up with people reinventing everything.
[1] https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-be-a-software-engi...
Just like I used to call Windows DLLs or COM libraries from TPW and Delphi.
Which incidently is how Google pushes everyone to write native code on Android, as little as possible, just tiny native libraries. Even the NativeActivity is just a regular Java Activity implementation with predefined native methods declarations that the shared object is expected to fill in, to be properly called from the framework.