[hdhzy]

I wish I could upvote this several times. That's my exact experience as well.

I would like more people to experience what was the way of creating software with Delphi, seamless and easy, really closing the loop between creating and the resulting application and then look back at what unnecessary complexity we are dealing with every day when working with software. (nb I think there was a blog somewhere by one of Delphi's creators where they explicitly mentioned that the language and IDE were designed to be simple to use).

If I will be teaching programming to my children I will dig up old installation of Delphi 7 and just let them play.

[Certhas]

Absolutely. I did GUI programming with Delphi in high school, then haven't touched it till now, and I am somewhat shocked how the ability to create desktop (or web) GUIs today seems to lag so much behind how I remember Delphi.

Might be nostalgia speaking, but even if it doesn't lag behind, I'm pretty sure it hasn't gotten better. I guess QT Creator actually comes close.

(Plus: Compile times were never ever an issue...)

[pjmlp]

The majority of tools for native apps desktops and mobile OSes (minus deployment) still comes close to Delphi.

Now for the web, nevermind.

[apta]

I don't do desktop app dev, but what tools are there? I'm aware of .NET under Visual Studio and NetBeans UI designer.

[pjmlp]

.NET has Windows Forms and XAML Visual Studio designer, and Blend for XAML.

Java has Netbeans Matisse for Swing, Eclipse WindowsBuilder for Swing and SWT, Scene Builder for JavaFX, Android Studio designer. Not sure what InteliJ offers.

Objective-C and Swift have the XCode GUI design tools, based on the NeXTStep development environment.

C++ has UI designers for Qt/QML, C++ Builder, UWP/XAML.

Object Pascal has Delphi and Lazarus.

Xojo as Visual Basic dialect also has its own designer.

Commercial Common Lisp environments like Alegro CL and LispWorks also have their designers in the tradition of Lisp Machines.

Smalltalk environments also have GUI designers.

These are just some examples that come to my mind.

[rcarmo]

I did that with Lazarus. Only real difficulty is finding kid-centric tutorials, but they manage.

[jimbokun]

I feel similar nostalgia about HyperCard on the Mac.