A few big changes happened in the 90s. - Internet rapidly became increasingly ubiquitous. And it was largely aligned with the Unix philosophy of plaintext for

A few big changes happened in the 90s. - Internet rapidly became increasingly ubiquitous. And it was largely aligned with the Unix philosophy of plaintext formats. - Computers became fast enough and powerful enough to make interpreted languages (and VM-based languages) usable. - Open source took off. - This produced explosion of new, free scripting languages that were really good at working with strings, dynamic data structures, and plaintext formats. - Visual Studio and Delphi both still cost thousands of dollars. Not something you could download and evaluate or try out. Not something you'd decide to learn on a whim. And not something with a big community of open-source developers sharing things for free. Delphi made the business decision to price out the small shops and individuals that were its customers in hopes of going after an enterprise market. - Except in some areas (games, embedded, etc.) the industry shifted toward making things with open-source scripting languages or java for the business stuff. Those who remained in desktop and didn't switch to java switched to visual studio. - The creator of Delphi left and went to Microsoft and created C# to compete with java. The static languages were also somewhat slow to adapt to plaintext data formats. They typically used proprietary binary formats and those were easy to work with (they could basically directly load and dump to/from RAM/disk). But serializing and unserializing and marshaling and unmarshaling to/from plaintext formats was a pain. Eventually they got generics and templates and macros and things to make it less painful, but it's still nowhere near as simple as in the typical interpreted dynamic language. (I recently modified an old 80s-90s era C program to output JSON and did some work on getting a Pascal program to read it.)