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So where is Clarion?

http://softvelocity.com/

Used all over the world, but only by people that know things... 8-)

Shit like this has been around for decades from Clarion http://www.softvelocity.com/ to Windev http://www.windev.com/index.ht... . And no don't balk these products never took the skill out of programming they just automated the tedious bits about browses, forms and reports you still had to be a good programmer to make the shit work.

Compilers resemble expert systems. They helped early programs become ten times more productive than machine /assembly language programs. ...

That's quite true, compilers, and later on linkers, were a huge advance over the previous ways of building software.

And it is continuing. If you want to see an example of AI working with Programmers as a team, see the Template driven Code Generators used in the Clarion development system.
http://www.softvelocity.com/

But it will cost you $1000 to try it...

The reason that the old programs must be maintained, is that the people that wrote them were smarter than you and knew more about what the company needed.
If you throw it away and try to re-write the programs in a new system, they will lose functionality and much of the remaining functionality will be wrong.
The existing specifications are always incomplete, so the only complete record of what is running is the source code for the old programs.
Just because you find learning other peoples programs to be very frustrating, does not mean you can avoid learning it.
The second step, in learning anything new, is frustration. If you avoid frustration, you will never learn anything new.

By the way, I'm using the Clarion development system. http://www.softvelocity.com/

As a RAD environment, it is (or was :) ) without peer.

For database work, VB was unparalleled.

I'd challenge both of these. Though not well enough known, Clarion (http://www.softvelocity.com) definitely challenges VB as a RAD environment, and beats it hands down for database work. Clarion's dictionary and template-based generator will write most database code for you. Even more impressive, once you've defined the tables you need in the dictionary, Clarion will slickly generate a full-blown data entry program for those tables. That's often how I start out new applications - define tables in the dictionary, generate the data entry program, and then tweak as necessary. It gives you a definite leg up on getting an app started, and if you are careful while creating the dictionary, you won't have to do that much tweaking.

Now if we could just get SoftVelocity to market it better

I guess whether or not you consider C to be the dominant language would depend on what you're trying to accomplish. It's far too arcane and slow to develop for a lot of the things I do, (I do most of my development in Clarion -- a blindingly fast RAD development tool) but then, C packs a hell of a punch when you need to do some tricky low-level work.

But back to the topic at hand, when/if this gets to the point that it can build DLLs (or whatever the linux/BSD equivalent is) it will be EXTREMELY useful to me. A lot of academic code that I look at when exploring new coding ideas (Such as David Goldberg's Simple Genetic Algorithm and Genetic Classifier Systems) is written in Pascal and is more understandable in that form than it would be in C. It would be great to be able to take what others have done in Pascal, tweak it a bit, build a library, and tie it directly into a Clarion/VB/C/C++ app.

A lot of work has been done in Pascal over the past decades. Not having to reinvent the wheel to make use of it seems like justification enough for a project like this.

Just my 2 cents.

It is faster to develop an application in VB than any other Language

Actually, for speed of development for business applications, I'd rather go with Clarion. Clarion also lets you generate whole applications with a few clicks, but the templates mechanism that makes this possible is open, and you can add your own template code to automate things that you find yourself doing often. This is better than 'wizards'. I just wish they would port the environment to Linux.

No -- Symantec bought Zortech, turned it into Symantec C++, back when Symantec was into development tools; it had the coolest Windows IDE at the time, but like many other Symantec products throughout the years it died a silent death.

Walter Bright probably did a deal with Symantec to acquire the rights to the compiler and development tools; essentially this the free C++ compiler available on the Digital Mars site.

Zortech may have been the first native C++ compiler, but TopSpeed had the better one, known as the fastest compiler around. TopSpeed had a common IDE/back end for C/C++, Pascal and probably some other languages. TopSpeed merged with Clarion and Clarion/TopSpeed was acquired by SoftVelocity. Clarion isn't C++, but its compiler is probably still based on TopSpeed technology.