[mrweasel]

One reason I could see, based on teaching teenagers programming. They want to build GUI applications and Delphi allows that very easily.

Sure C# and Visual Studio makes more sense and they could get everything for free, but maybe Turkey doesn't like/trust Microsoft.

[mbreese]

When I was in undergrad taking Data Structures and Algorithms, the course was in C (or C++, I don't remember). But by that time I had already started programming GUIs in Windows (MFC days). It was actually really nice to wire up the base classes and operations for a data structure (push/pop/etc...) and then be able to see the operations working with a GUI. At the time, it was really cool to be able to click a "pop" button and see the head of a queue get removed.

It was even better to visually see various sort algorithms in motion.

So, really, I could see the appeal for that kind of teaching... but I still don't understand using Delphi/Pascal.

(Our first CS class was actually taught with Pascal and that was painful)

[vintagedave]

I agree the impact of writing code and seeing something onscreen is very important.

> I had already started programming GUIs in Windows (MFC days)

MFC and Delphi's UI model are completely incomparable. One is statically built, often in code, inflexible, hard to iterate, hard to use custom controls... and one is modern OO, buildable visually (streamed to text, so editable in text), incredibly flexible, very fast to modify, and with thousands of custom controls.

And these days it builds for macOS, mobile (iOS and Android), and Linux too. So it's a decent choice.