It depends on what you’re trying to do. In delphi you get a huge class library out of the box, and mostly you don’t need much else. There’s also still much third party stuff around the web from its glory years. The tricky part is interfacing with new external systems, and there it’s usually a matter of calling into a C library, which is easy to do.

I’ve found PHP to be trickier actually, because if there’s no extension to connect to the system you want, you don’t have a real fallback plan except writing your own extension in C.