Re: Still use Delphi
Firstly, I'd like to congratulate you on the excellent and appropriate use of an en dash in Dunning–Kruger. Someone taking the time to use an oft-overlooked punctuation convention pleases me.
In answer to a few of your questions - yes, the GUI is only for Windows, sadly. There is no built-in support for GUIs on other platforms, though there are a number of third-party solutions. ASP has moved on a little to become ASP.NET, and isn't quite as evil as it used to be. I guess it's as close to a built-in cross-platform GUI system as .NET core gets (which isn't very). As for compiling for Linux - one good thing about the system is that its built-in gubbins (or bloat, if you prefer!) means an identical DLL can be used on any platform. I'm making a class library to be referenced from an ASP.NET front end, and all I have to do is compile it once, whatever system the back end is going to live on.
For console apps, it's possible to build a platform-specific thing that includes all the libraries with it (in the same install location), meaning there would be no need to maintain a .NET Core installation separately on the target machine. This is, I admit, a bit messy; you could end up with the same libraries installed multiple times in different places for different applications on the same machine. And as far as I can tell, it doesn't let you take only the bits you need. So that's an extra 58MB for every application. (If someone else knows better about that, then I'd be interested to find out how you do it!) But if your machine is generally doing .NET things, then the Core libraries only need to be there once, and my DLL on it's own is a few tens of kBs. Much larger is the data file I need it to access, but that can't really be avoided.
As for trust and support, I think that as of .NET 3, people in general are getting quite enthusiastic about the whole thing. I think if MS made a random decision to cut it off (as they may be apt, and have admittedly done with other things), then my hope is that it would be continued/forked by volunteers, what with it being open source now. For the moment, they seem committed to moving everything into it and (fingers crossed) letting the .NET Framework die. .NET Core 3.1 is an LTS version, supported for three years, which seems vaguely promising. I'd be happier with five, though.
As for Delphi, I never had the pleasure. I knew people in the late '90s who loved it, but back then I wasn't really developing in any useful sense, so I never picked it up. I cut my teeth on BBC Basic, moved on to VB, and danced via a circuitous route to other languages. This will prove controversial, but my favourite language to code in, entirely aside from the large VM required to run it, was Smalltalk. I spent five years as a dev using it for a major (multi-gigabyte) application (meaning the size of the VM was neither here nor there), and it was just an absolute pleasure to debug. Ooh - there's an exception, no matter, here's the piece of code it happened in with the problem highlighted - I see my error - there - ooh, what value is that variable - oh, that should fix it - go - oh, look, it's running fine again now without re-starting/re-compiling/even missing a beat. It was slowish in terms of mathematical calculations, but we used FORTRAN DLLs for the back-end of things like finite element analysis. I still miss it. If written properly, it's also wonderfully self-documenting. I could look at a method written ten years ago (seeing again, at a glance, who last edited it and precisely when - useful sometimes for asking them what the hell they were thinking, and added a degree of accountability) and understand exactly what it was doing at a glance. Good times. Don't know why it's not more popular.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
