[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.