"non programmers can create simple programs"

What does that mean? You can be a non programmer and make simple programs in most general purpose programming languages.

Are you talking about the VCL library? In that case, there are many other languages that include the same like C# for example.

Delphi is hard to beat in ease-of-use of the GUI editing. It's not just that it ships with the component library, it's that the editor integrates it so well.

...and before someone tries to counterpoint that Visual C# has WinForms which is similar to Delphi, yes it is similar, but the functionality available in terms of design in Visual Studio 2019 isn't up to par with Delphi 2.

The libraries with source like other languages also do today, but also that the language is verbose like Visual Basic did.

> great backwards compatibility

How good was Delphi at hiding MS-DOS quirks? I know C from that platform tended to be nonstandard with near and far pointers to accommodate memory segmentation, but was Delphi any better?

Delphi was a Windows-only product. Delphi 1 and its predecessor, Turbo Pascal, only supported far pointers to data, and could support far or near procedure calls with an annotation (essentially, a compiler pragma).

> only supported far pointers to data

Which meant that as long as you didn't have to call C functions you just had to know and write that "it's a pointer" and nothing more.