liam_on_linux | The early battle of the Pascals left Microsoft an opening

Way way back, before DOS and the PC and so on, the UCSD p-System was very widespread.

Borland's Turbo Pascal supplanted it, but TP on DOS was very different from the original CP/M TP, and indeed with Delphi on Windows it transformed again into something wholly different and much more powerful.

Delphi fused Turbo Pascal, its fast compiler and rich capable DOS IDE, with something much like NeXTstep's Interface Builder and a set of OOPS libraries for Pascal to construct GUIs.

Which inspired MS to copy it, taking the forms painter from the Ruby database tool, and an extended kinda-sorta BASIC, and some OLE/COM GUI controls, to make something... well, sprawling and unfocused and sluggish and overcomplicated.

Then, when MS was seriously afraid that its OS and apps divisions would be split up by the DoJ, which the company forcibly transformed into .NET so it would have a tool for asserting cross-platform apps dominance.

But the fierce and determined Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson was replaced with the conciliatory Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, and she backed down and let MS get away with it.

So the big split never happened, and MS was left with a fancy cross-platform tool it no longer really needed.

The result has been decades of bloat and flab, a somewhat tokenistic FOSS version for Unix-like OSes, and a wasted opportunity... but which nonetheless strangled the 3rd party compiler/dev-tools market on Windows.

Mac OS X succeeded because it bundled great dev tools, therefore strangling the Mac dev tools market.

And the Linux world does its monastic Unix self-denial thing -- plain text, horrible 1970s text editors, because suffering is good for the soul -- and never goes anywhere much. C++ is an evil modern heresy! We can have 50-line "object" calls in plain C, and it remains clean and holy, just as Saint Ritchie and the prophet Stallman decreed.

(Repurposed from a comment in this discussion.)