Dear friends, working from the first to the latest version in Clarion, knowing the history of the company and all the satellites that did additional “things” and helped Clation, I want to say the following and I think I have the right to, because in addition to Clarion I rule with 9 software tools. When Borland “burst”, after some time, the Embarcadero company took over. Delphi is also alive through Lazarus. Windev survives, whatever I think of it as “beautiful” with engineering solutions that are much better in clarion. So clarion has to offer a ‘student’ free version and give users a trial version,
if he wants to live. Well, it’s not enough to throw out any screen 2. I’m actually wondering if someone didn’t pay the important people from the company not to do these two simple things, which everyone does. 1. Student version - for young people to hear about the development environment at all - then everything goes easier.
. trial version for developers who would surely opt for charion, provided that we are no longer embarrassed with 32 bits and do not explain how great it is to be 32 and still improve a little and expand the capabilities of the web server, not to think that net talk super solution, or any screen etc. The point is, just as Delphi continued to live in various ways, whoever took it over or was open source, so did clarion, it has no right to stagnate, not follow architecture and not do normal things for its marketing. If this does not happen, everyone will call us a “sect of old men” who are trying to keep up with the times, but it will no longer be clear to anyone what a clarion is. Let’s get a few gentlemen serious, so let them put it on the stock market, if they don’t want to seriously develop one of the best design and programming environments.
I can agree that Clarion is one of the best design and programming environments. I don’t wan to be member of “sect of old men” 
There isnt anything stopping you from producing your own 3rd party addons which can further improve the features and functionality of Clarion.
I think its programmer talent which holds back the 3rd party addons unless other developers dont want the hassle of being a 3rd party addons supplier.
Andy Ireland who I think used to work in the UK dev team gave me his source code for COM, which is seen in some addons as a PWutil.dll, PW being PlugWare solutions.com Ltd.
Now I dont know what the reasons are for not building a Visual Basic like COM interface into the IDE, but his code is still going strong today which is the best part of 15years later!
Maybe Clarion is like the way it is, because any idiot like me, can knock out a program and not understand how it works which isnt good for those times when things do go wrong.
I’ve heard too many rumours, and things are just turned out like they are.
If Softvelocity were to close tomorrow, would it affect me, probably not, I’d still be doing what I’m doing, which is writing templates for things I think should have been in clarion years ago.
Edit:
I think standing back from this situation and looking back at the whole IT sector for the last 20-30+years will add some perspective.
So most will know, IBM were dominant, didnt see a future in PC’s probably because it was going to reduce their income stream, I experienced this with a FTSE listed employer who was heavily invested in IBM mainframes. Their reluctance to move to a pc didnt happen until the 90’s with Novell Netware and Windows 3.1 with Lotus. That was it, nothing else was really dominant back in the 90’s and very importantly, no one knew what information they could get out of a computer and they didnt know what information they wanted, especially the board. Today its a case of log everything and see what patterns emerge which could give insights over and above the traditionally obvious bottom line.
DDE, OLE, COM, DCOM, kind of all the same, a need to communicate data between programs and then programs on different machines via Remote Procedure Control (RPC) aka Remote Desktop Protocol.
During this time, MS still gaining and maintaining market dominance, innovating and pushing new tech, so all other programming tools like Clarion, Delphi are driven/held back by what MS do with Windows.
Windev obviously had a toe in the Apple pool perhaps to hedge bets.
Apple, niche following amongst media types, but those media types fuel the public consciousness. Also lacked any commercial sense, were more focused on multi media and iphone. Sure they had their servers but they werent into the commercial domain, ie AFAIK they didnt produced their own RDBMS. They developed a few of their own protocols like AppleTalk but thats about it.
All of them were employing patent lawyers left right and centre to fortify defences whilst picking fights with each other in the patent courts, even MS was getting hauled up in court by the US govt for some of its tricks and now by the EU Govt.
In this time, niche products appear, like MySql, Apache becomes dominant webserver, Exchange become dominant email server, Blackberry appear for a short period with BBM and their interface for Exchange.
Facebook appear in early 00’s, I must be one of the few Zuck has personally removed from Facebook when he was running it in his dorms (and thats another story)! Look at what he’s done with that, built a whole eco system which can control political systems, but now doing frameworks for apps which run on any device like we see with AnyScreen and has a toe in the AI market because lets face it, AGI is the holy grail!
I should mention Google, they built a successful advertising business around a search engine, they have tried competing in various domains, like documentation & email, there is probably some subconcious bias that MS has that domain wrapped up, Google bring out new stuff then shelve it, unlike MS which makes a big play on backwards compatibility, a resource drain in its own, but MS have that tangent handled well. MS also probably understands the needs of big business more than anyone else like Apple, Google & Facebook.
So when you look back at the history of the IT industry, we have had standards changed/improved/worsened, new players become dominant, new technology appearing and evolving, because no one knows where the investment is going, like who could have predicted mobile internet and Covid would make it possible to work from anywhere in the world as we get forced to work from home?
The EU is now starting to wake up and stand up to the USUK anglosaxon world, China is a new player, although as a paper boy I remember having discussions with a fellow paper boy whose father worked in London and even in the 80’s he wasnt going to learn French or German he was going to learn Mandarin, which is now the second most widely spoken language in the world and that is where the money is right now!
So a company like Softvelocity with Clarion, and other programming companies & languages are always going to be followers because they are not the dominant FAANG players.
Being technically superior, is not enough to be the dominant player in a domain, you need that marketing machine, you need those influencers, you need those special relationships with other people (Govt contacts), and even if you have all of that, if the crowd doesnt want to do programming, because its easier to pamper one’s ego on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (have I left any other social media platforms out) with bots, then people will do that with their spare time and some even make a career out of it. There is a lot to be learnt about individual human needs.
Now could SV strike up a deal with Tim Cook @ Apple because Clarion is “business databases” and its what Apple lacks. Do Apple want to get into that business domain?
And if you look at global events, we seem to be in a period of pulling back from globalisation, ie less co-operation more nationalism., perhaps a return to a Cold War mentality.
So when looking at the history of business and tech development during the cold war, its a period of time for individual businesses and nations to emerge as new dominant players. So whilst some people might view the period of time after the last cold war as the United States period of dominance, things could be changing, we might be seeing the EU become the new dominant player so then it will be a case of watching out for European tech, plus China are also in the midst of producing their own CPU despite US sanctions, like Germany they have a lot of cash so who know’s what will come out of China?
But it seems those who can build bureaucratic systems are maybe the best placed for building tech systems, like we see with Windows.
Anyway thats just my take on things.
Thanks for the discussion. I do not write from a purely personal point of view. I have written and optimized so many classes and data models that I have made a “SAP” in clarion that works without crashing in the largest data centers, even stock exchanges …,
The Point is exclusively that, such as Delphi continued to live even though Borland broke down, that the language and its concept : 1. took over Embarcadero and continues to develop it 2. Not related to that open source commune develops it called Lazarus. It follows that Deplhi lives for the world community, that the concept expands.
Therefore, I suggested that SoftVelocity: 1. make, like all other producers a community version, popularize it 2. release a trial version, like all other producers of programming languages
What prevents them from doing this in the most normal way in terms of marketing? I say it’s not me. Personally, I have developed huge projects in openxava, c #, as well as relatively less in Delphi and Lazarus … but it’s a shame that many of my colleagues, especially the younger ones, haven’t even heard of Clarion. Let them do anything to popularize, from the proposed to the 64-bit compiler,etc Let them sell it to another company if they don’t want to popularize it, so I can’t do it alone with clarion society. The Clarion concept can easily conquer the market with these few suggestions. I write about it. Whoever prevents that doesn’t like clarion, which is a shame.
I only found Clarion when I was 14, part time data entry into dos program, was convinced the program could be improved, found out the programmer was relative to store owner, an accountant who picked up CPD2.1 when in the states at a computer fair or something, and wrote it as a side line to his accountancy job.
Having been taught programming at primary school by school (didnt realise how much my primary school had fast tracked us on somethings until a few years ago when looking back) and a university graduate who lived next door. So when I saw the way Clarion worked, ie it saved alot of time by removing the repetitive tasks in programming I was hooked and havent seen a better way in anything else, because the templates are like the ultimate framework building code generation tool.
Saying that IF Softvelocity were to shutup shop, unless it got bought up by someone to get the legal rights to the code, if it in effect became public domain I’d probably use GitHub - NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra: Ghidra is a software reverse engineering (SRE) framework to reverse engineer the source.
I’ve been working on my own code translator, which is nothing like this 128 language quine GitHub - mame/quine-relay: An uroboros program with 100+ programming languages
Quine (computing) - Wikipedia but something to take the pseudo code generated by Ghidra and then port it to any other language, and in some cases this translator will need to generate byte code for different CPU’s because I want to branch out onto Arm’s cpu’s.
At least this way I wont be trapped in anyway, but some bigger richer entity could still buy up Clarion just to shelve it, that is a risk which exists today, has done in the past and will exist in the future, which is a risk with all programming languages, other than what comes out of a FAANG entity, and even then they might still shelve it, when looking at what Google has shelved.
Saying that, I do think there is some political pressure being applied to STEM subjects, Eric Schmidt (ex Google ceo) has had alot of high profile influence at Govt level in driving people especially women to STEM subjects, as the need for programmers is massive because humans by nature are lazy, the computer now exists in various guises and the security services/military/law enforcement/govt especially the US are not going pass up an opportunity to spy on everyone either through legislation or secret court orders to big players, to maintain control, further the knowledge of science and anything else they deem to be worthy. Besides they know where we all are if we are stuck in front of computer!
Anyway for me, if SV were to shut up shop, I no longer feel trapped since finding Ghidra and the language translator I’ve built and continue to work on. Few bugs in it still, but I first wrote it to add debug code to templates to make debugging them easier, so it can add debugview code to my templates and now see what a template is doing because the debug txt file in the IDE doesnt show that much information.
A proper test for that though, will be translating the most popular FOSS on github into Clarion so Clarion can compile it and do what we want with it. How far that goes, ie swapping out lib libraries for windows api’s I dont know, I like the idea of having apache or nginx written in Clarion.
“I like the idea of having apache or nginx written in Clarion.” I am glad to have an intelligent and educated man as my interlocutor. Logic and experience come first. Of course apache in Clarion and like Lazarus ‘Delphi’ for linux, so you need to release a version of Clarion for linux, in order to popularize the thing. The fact that you and I will dig through space and maybe make an OS in Clarion 
and a multi-platform Clarion, better than Java, is our personal struggle :). Everything has long been clear to me about corporations and lowering the level of applied informatics. For now, that battle cannot be won. But let’s get the story back to the center of the coordinate system. The thing is simple. If it can OpenXava , if it can Delphi, ie Lazarus, if it can RadZen, companies smaller and poorer than SV, then they can also find the proposed simple ways in marketing.
In the end, I will motivate the team from Lazarus to make an impoverished win \ linux distribution, just to keep things going, to expand the concept, and SV
then spread their wings, when the younger of us realize that they have another tool While we are talking about global trends, the above mentioned programming languages are conquering the Clarion market, because our dear Clarion is very late and has no vision. Too bad, they were great.
I will guess that folks at SV, and Z in particular, like Clarion. If the Clarion concept can so easily conquer the market, it begs the question as to why your necessary steps have not been taken?
If it can OpenXava, RadZen Clarion can do it also. Who knows what’s on their minds. That’s why I suggest that SV release 1. community version 2. Trial version and why not, opensource version, which would have nothing to do with SV, just as the team from Embarcadero company, has no connection with Lazarus, which is essentially opensource Delphi in essence , and yet they sell their RAD tools very well, which they continued after Borland, ie Delphi and visual C ++. So delphi lives both through commercial sales and through the opensource community.That’s all from me .
.Net works on windows and linux and I think this is why C7+ is dotnet so you can run it on Linux distro’s.
I havent tried that personally, I’m not a fan of Linux for various reasons.
Update on .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI) - .NET Blog (microsoft.com)
What is .NET MAUI? - .NET MAUI | Microsoft Docs
but other libraries exist which will work on a cross platform basis, like Steam (if you have a game orientation)
Steam, The Ultimate Online Game Platform (steampowered.com)
Java obviously
There is also Wine and coding our own libraries if we want to with pointers like this
c++ - Creating a portable library to run on both linux and windows - Stack Overflow
But all of this takes time and money, so its a case of pick the best strategy and put the hours in.
Picking the best strategy is the hard bit, do you choose safe option like .net MAUI or something else like Wine or something from this list? 
The Top 226 Library Cross Platform Open Source Projects on Github (awesomeopensource.com)
Well there is/was the clarion community thing.
Clarion Community Edition - Clarion (clarionsharp.com)
Example-Demo Apps - Clarion (clarionsharp.com)
I dont know how that is progressing.
Search engines, media (computer magazines), big budgets, there are so many languages and tools to choose from now a days.
How many programming languages are there? - DevSkiller
Wiki claims something like 700 (?active?) languages,
List of programming languages - Wikipedia
and others claim like 9000 languages.
HOPL
Hardware gets retired like mainframes, as cpu’s and stuff have improved, I think DDR5 is the next new RAM standard becoming mainstream so accountants decide when its time to retire old kit.
Schools listen to the likes of Google/RapsberryPi so you have python being pushed alongside C/C++/Pascal, the later two being what I had to learn. There’s more emphasis on robotics today and electronics, hence the Rpi, (industrial) control systems is big business and are getting everywhere as we see with so many consumer gadgets. More emphasis on open source/linux distro’s so things are diluting and its case of getting the attention of the right people. Some traditional methods still work, others dont.
I dont think anyone has the answer because no one can predict the future, I think at best all you can do is learn from the past and try to spot trends occurring and work out if its going to be useful or not.
The Clarion Template framework is a nice concept, I havent seen anything quite like it, the .h files have tiny bits of macro code in, but how much work do you put into a template?
The #RunDLL and TXA/TXD makes things easier but there are still things I cant do in C11 today with the templates, at least very easily, I could with the IDE command line facilities, but the Return versus the Required Effort is not there.
I found this link interesting.
NIELS JENSEN EXPLAINS HOW TOPSPEED LEAVES BORLAND’S TURBO COMPILERS STANDING - Tech Monitor
Its interesting because the problems back then was eeking out the speed from the slow chips, today, thats not really a problem, especially with cloud computing.
Yes. !! You are a true intellectual, engineer and logician. We need such people in all areas, so that this civilization can live on the right foundations. Logic, research spirit, knowledge and infinite perseverance. I see how many of them have read our constructive communication in one day, and I do not know whether to express regret that colleagues do not join. Well, you see this is an initiative. Now let’s see if other respected colleagues have a little more vision and will, except who wrote a better class in C ++ or C # which of course has not been tested on a network of a few hundred computers and millions of data, but only locally Well, my friend, we need to introduce what is the optimal and functional solution in the modalities of thinking of programmers. However, perhaps this initiative will come out of the narrow angle of view thanks to people like you. I wish all the best. [email protected]
Very extensive, intellectual and useful discussion between @DD66 and @anon23294430 . I haven’t seen that in a long time.
Thanks to both of you.
I’m not qualified in anything, didnt even go to Uni because some people messed around with my education and made it impossible for me to study.
Just to remind
Many years ago, after Clarion for DOS 3.0, I ordered and received a trial version of CW 5.0 /on CD/.
I got 5.25" floppies for CPD2.1 although it might have been the smaller floppies (long time ago - too many parties), CW1.5 came on the 3.5" floppies, then I jumped to and got C5 on CD, C5.5 on CD, C6 on CD, and I found out that things like C6.3 905x came on CD, so the UK distributor sent me a copy of the all C6 updates that came on cd which was useful as these were full updates not the smaller delta patches. ODBC developer addon came on CD as well.
When I talk to non-Clarion developers, especially the younger ones, they are immediately put off by the cost. That acts as a barrier to them trying and seeing the benefit of such a powerful environment. I then have to suggest they try Lazarus, to see a RAD. The idea of a student copy, or evaluation option as suggested is therefore something that might help.
We do need Clarion to grow rather than retract because without this it will be increasingly difficult to find work where the investment in gaining Clarion skill can be turned into income.
At that stage they are not convinced that its an investment. I think maybe some youtube videos could demonstrate what it does over other languages and tools. Sure a bit of time but then its up on youtube and anyone can be directed to it and see it in action.
Now whilst Clarion programmers are like Hen’s teeth which means nice wages, the flip side is some businesses dont have the budget for Hen’s teeth and they will go with languages that have programmers that you can get in every country on this planet and suffer all the problems of having multiple coders without proper project management & coding standards.
I cant complain about the amounts you can earn with Clarion, my highest highest hourly wage was £5k a hour for a fixed price contract job. I’d be surprised if anyone has beaten that!
I am glad that this discussion is going in the direction of knowledge, empiricism and professionalism. I have always held that theory and knowledge are inseparable. We hope and strive that positive trends will prevail in informatics.
Being that SoftVelocity is essentially a one man show these days, I think it’s obvious that the Clarion user-base/community will continue to shrink, and not grow. No matter what 3rd party developers do, it won’t make a difference when the owner of the base product will forever stick to his ‘dog with a bone’ mentality. If Clarion does what you want today, then more power to you; but to think that it’s ever going to become anything more than it is today, is just wishful thinking. Sorry folks.
Completely agree on both, though one might prefer a crab in a bucket.
Yeah, its just like Linux having all its eggs in one basket with Linus Torvalds! 
I think thats a matter of opinion, there isnt anything stopping me from using Clarion to develop my own language and IDE to rival it and thats the risk with a publicly available programming tool with concepts that are ahead of the game in all other programming IDE’s.