Delphi
Object Pascal with a visual component library, still used in commercial desktop and database software.
27 steps across 1 tours, from the basics to complete programs.
The tours
- First released
- 1995
- Created by
- Anders Hejlsberg at Borland
- Typing
- Static and explicit; declarations up front, begin and end out loud
- Snippets target
- Delphi 13
- File extensions
- .pas, .dpr, .pp
What it is for
Delphi is the survivor of the 1990s RAD wars: the language of Turbo Pascal with classes, properties, and events, welded to a visual component library so productive that a working Windows application took an afternoon. That inheritance still runs point-of-sale terminals, lab instruments, medical office software, and factory floors — domains that reward code readable ten years after it shipped.
The language says everything out loud: variables declare before use in a var block, assignment is :=, blocks are begin and end, and procedures are distinct from functions. What looks like ceremony is the point — Pascal was designed as a teaching language, and Delphi kept that legibility while adding a real object model, interfaces, and generics. Enumerated types with sets remain nicer here than in almost any successor.
Free Pascal and Lazarus keep the language open: one portable compiler that speaks the Delphi dialect on every platform (these seeds compile under fpc in Delphi mode), an IDE that rebuilds the RAD experience, and a community that never needed the trademark. Learning it is partly history — Anders Hejlsberg's next two languages were J++ and C#, and the property/event model he built here went with him.
Where it came from
Niklaus Wirth designed Pascal in 1970 to teach structured programming; Borland's Turbo Pascal (1983, $49.95, compiled in seconds) made it the people's compiler and put a language meant for universities inside a generation of small businesses. Object Pascal grew at Apple with Wirth consulting, then at Borland through the late 1980s.
Delphi launched in 1995 as Borland's answer to Visual Basic: the same drag-and-drop speed, but compiled to native code with a real language underneath. Anders Hejlsberg's architecture — components, properties, events, a visual form designer over an object-oriented language — defined an era; versions 1 through 7 (2002) are still remembered as the golden run, and Delphi 7 installs survive in industry today.
Borland stumbled through the 2000s and the product passed to Embarcadero (2008), which still ships yearly releases targeting Windows, macOS, mobile, and Linux. The open-source track outgrew its origin: Free Pascal (1993-) plus Lazarus (1999-) reimplemented the dialect and the RAD model, and it is that compiler — fpc in Delphi mode — that checks every seed here.
What it is like to type
Delphi types wordy but even: begin and end instead of braces, := for every assignment, and semicolons as separators keep a steady rhythm without symbol clusters. The var block means you type declarations in bursts before the logic starts, and Delphi casing — WriteLn, Format, Integer against lowercase keywords — exercises the shift key on identifiers instead of operators. Single quotes for strings, and the final end takes a period.
27 steps across 1 tours, from the basics to complete programs.