[jksmith]

Yeah agree. While I've moved on, IMHO xcode was generally crap compared to dev envs I used back in the friggin 90's, like Delphi or Topspeed. Not many on HN know much about Delphi, but it set the gold standard for the desktop IDE.

Great thing about Go is you don't need much of an IDE because it's best to just keep Go in its sweet spot, which is services. LiteIDE works great for Go- small footprint,debugging, enough project management to get by. Just like with everything else about Go, you can get a newbie dev going with the Go toolchain actually producing something that works in hardly any time.

[gurkendoktor]

To add some anecdata, I know three people (myself included) who moved from "playing with Delphi 5 as a student" into iOS dev. And I still feel that ObjC in Xcode is (sadly) the best replacement for Delphi right now:

- A stable and pragmatic language that interfaces well with the C world.

- Nice separation of class interface/implementation; ARC is as easy as COM was in Delphi; solid reflection/metaprogramming capabilities (e.g. enumerating properties).

- Compilation is fast enough on my 5y/o laptop.

- A standard library that is so good that people never re-invent it.

- The debugger works really well and is always-on (IntelliJ still has separate "Run" and "Debug" buttons, facepalm).

- IBDesignable/IBInspectable makes writing your own components as nice as it was in Delphi: http://nshipster.com/ibinspectable-ibdesignable/

The points above will probably fall apart with Swift, but right now it's not actually too bad.