I was involved with building out a php-based web app to replace parts of a large delphi application. In the beginning it took us about five times as long to bui

I was involved with building out a php-based web app to replace parts of a large delphi application. In the beginning it took us about five times as long to build a feature, and it took years to build out a set of practices, libraries and ui controls which got us near the delphi team's productivity. I don't think we ever caught up fully. Delphi remains a well kept secret for one man armies to build desktop apps, even with an IDE that isn't competitive with modern IDE's anymore. My dad used it to build his own patient management software that is competitive in features with the commercial software in that space. The lead it had over competing dev envs back in its heyday was astounding, easy like VB, fast and powerful like C. If it had been managed properly it would still be a major player. Too bad it was managed by Borland.