Delphi was my first exposure to a real programming language almost 20 years ago. I'm very glad that it was it as I look upon the landscape of software engineeri

Delphi was my first exposure to a real programming language almost 20 years ago. I'm very glad that it was it as I look upon the landscape of software engineering nowadays and it's totally opaque to beginners. Delphi has right abstractions in a right place - you designed the form in a easy GUI and filled in methods with your code [0]. Why it was that way? Because it was designed to be simple and it worked (no need for Bret Victor's magic). (There was a blog of former Delphi developer that explained their thought process) For the record I worked professionally in JavaScript (TypeScript) (backend and frontend), Java (Kotlin), C# and Ruby. I also did small chunks of support code in C/C++, Rust, Red/Rebol, Python, PHP, Go, Prolog and Lua. If I wanted to teach kids programming today, something easy to understand but at the same sufficiently complex I'd probably choose Delphi (Lazarus looks like Delphi 5/7 from screenshots). [0]: manual memory management was harder than GC but on the other hand it thought a lesson...