I "grew up on" Object Pascal as a developer — first Turbo Pascal, then Borland Pascal (for DOS and Windows), then Delphi, up until the early 2000s. Back then,

I "grew up on" Object Pascal as a developer — first Turbo Pascal, then Borland Pascal (for DOS and Windows), then Delphi, up until the early 2000s. Back then, I wrote GUI apps and commercial games, but I also did a lot of non-GUI development in Delphi, using technologies like COM, MAPI, etc. While Delphi itself wasn't "meant" for non-GUI development, it was still a very nice experience. The interactive debugger was fantastic, as it always was in Borland's tools. Nowadays, I don't see room for Object Pascal. While later versions of Delphi have improved on the syntax (e.g. generics), it's still a fairly old-fashioned language. It doesn't really have anything special to offer someone who already knows C#, Go, Rust, Java, Nim, etc. There's a strong Object Pascal influence on both Go and Nim, and those languages improve on it in every way, including the size of the communities, the available libraries, and so on. Delphi's killer app used to be GUI development on Windows, but these days you need to target multiple platforms, and I'm not a believer in cross-platform GUI toolkits; you end up with something that doesn't look great on any platform. I look at Object Pascal with a lot of fondness, but it's mostly nostalgia.