Well, in my comments I was restricting my examples mostly to server side software running on UNIX. This eliminates much of the proprietary lockin and portabili

Well, in my comments I was restricting my examples mostly to server side software running on UNIX. This eliminates much of the proprietary lockin and portability problems you mention. I never was saying people should just keep using Delphi into the 21st century. Also, my comments apply to broad categories of solutions not just software implementations in the narrow sense. For example: I just replaced (had to for perf reasons) a NOSQL solution in one of our applications with MySQL. Ironically, the application would actually scale better with NoSQL in theory, but the choices the developers made along the way (data modelling and API design) made it perform worse on the NoSQL DB than on MySQL. The tactical solution, which fits our needs and the size of our user base, turned out to be to replace a new shiny thing, with an older technology. The benefit gained was more flexibility with queries, which in turn allowed us to speed things up significantly with little effort. The previous team burned a lot of time learning the new NoSQL thing to then not get any benefit from it at all.