Some observations on Delphi, from someone who briefly used it in the mid-90's (so pre-.NET and all that): - Its main competitor was of course Visual C++ (and I

Some observations on Delphi, from someone who briefly used it in the mid-90's (so pre-.NET and all that): - Its main competitor was of course Visual C++ (and I guess to a lesser extent VB); it never quite gained the traction to supplant these, probably various factors here (explored in other comments); - Building GUIs was a lot nicer that using Visual C++, which at the time was locked into a weird model whereby there was a wizard to create apps that kind of forced you into its Document-View paradigm - a very specific way of looking at an application that wasn't always applicable (in my experience, in fact, rarely applicable). Delphi just allowed you to build GUIs with windows like a normal person; - C++ lacked STL at the time, we'd use weird stuff like RogueWave to get even basic things like usable strings, vectors etc; with Delphi this was all built in and it Just Worked in this regard; - Some lower-level shenanigans were difficult in Delphi, and the community was not much help. For forgotten reasons, I needed an equivalent of offsetof, and only eventually sussed out how to do this; - Verity Stob was a user (and fan) It's good to see that it's still going though.