Modern and blazing fast, what we lost leaving behind languages like Modula-2 and Object Pascal, having newer generations to think C and C++ were the only compiled languages alternatives to scripting languages.

I miss the years of writing CLI tools, web servers and clients, in Ada (and of course, real-time complex distributed system...). Felt so simple and right and fast and robust. The code is still readable today and maintaining it is a zero effort today. Clean Java without the enterprise BS was a close second in ease of programming - boilerplate be damned.

I'm glad NVIDIA found a way to make GPUs programmable and got us out of the shaders tarpit, but did it have to be C++...

You repeating this weird strawman take a million times doesn't make it true. Why don't you finally just put out some genuinely interesting projects demonstrating how everybody was doing it wrong, so people can make up their own mind and finally be convinced. There must be some true magic in those languages and platforms you mention, that should offset the pain of writing in upper case and with super long KEYWORDs everywhere, and to offset the cost of switching to a culture that has way less mindshare and way less of a software ecosystem around it.

FWIW I've actually worked for 6 months on a large old Delphi project. It was some performance work that, as almost always, mainly required getting the language crap out of the way. In the end I got the job done (100x-1000x speedup) but I wouldn't want to switch back to this ecosystem: Licensing costs, weird language warts there too. A slow moving ecosystem. Ultimately, I just need something that does what I tell it to do, reliably and fast, and that doesn't get in the way.