I used delphi extensively in the mid 90's, from the 1.0 release until about 2001. Those were probably some of the most enjoyable and productive times of my life

I used delphi extensively in the mid 90's, from the 1.0 release until about 2001. Those were probably some of the most enjoyable and productive times of my life. IMHO, nothing comes close to the syntactic clarity of object Pascal. This has a ton of knock on effects for long term maintainability. Plus, the early versions of the Delphi component model were insanely clear and well documented. My first delphi program was a reimplementation of a 6 month long (4 programmer) access database/vb application. I completely reimplemented a 2 man year project in about 24 hours with it using little more than the help docs. After a quick demo at work on Monday, everyone pretty much agreed to kick MS Access/vb to the curb and pick up my code base. The data aware components were a life saver, and to this day programming in a wide range of languages I am constantly reminded how painful doing things that were simple 20 years ago is. It drives a fundamental distaste into my mouth every time I'm hacking an AJAX app to do basic sorting/filtering of a simple result set. Usually doable with delphi in a matter of a few mouse clicks. Plus, by the late '90s there were a ton of 3rd party component libraries that nailed just about every GUI interaction an average program might need. The integration of reporting components made generating nice paper printouts a snap too. So, this is probably why its still being used. Reimplementing a delphi application of a hundred thousand lines is probably a thousand man year project with a "modern" web stack. And so, much like the mainframes running in the data centers of banks/insurance/etc companies, delphi is probably still driving a fair number of business logic applications. I know that some of the applications I wrote in the 90's are still in use at government agencies. BTW: I used BC builder too, and hated it even though I tend to like C++. The C++ syntax was simply to unwieldy vs pascal. I have periodically tried out more recent version of delphi or lazurus http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/ http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/ and they don't seem to be nearly as elegant as the early versions. Seems all the effort to make it cross platform (kylix) or match up with the .net component models cluttered up the early clarity of implementation.