Building desktop GUI apps is pretty niche these days compared with building browser apps.

The key question is: should it be so? Or: wouldn't the world be a better place if we had some equilibrium between web and desktop apps?

No.

But I can see this thread is populated with Delphi diehards.

I'm definitely not a Delphi diehard, but I tend to think it's a good thing to have computation done on my largely powerful enough, instead of it being done on a small VM at the other side of the world which doesn't provide me with any control over my data.

I have nothing to do with Delphi. But I miss the time when users were in control of their data, and you could still use your computer normally offline.

tkinter wants to have a word. See also wxPython, PyQt, etc. Not saying they’re as easy as Delphi.

> No modern language can create GUI applications with the ease of use of Delphi

Swift and Interface Buikder?

We do have webbrowsers for GUI widgets and beyond these days. By that metric, Javascript would definitely be a more relevant option.

Try to create a browser gui application using javascript, see how many resources it uses and how much time it takes you compared with Delphi, and just then, get out of my lawn.

Indeed it would - very easy to start with; and, today’s web browsers are extremely powerful VMs.

.NET is definitely the easiest possible way to do a widget UI, but it's not based on Delphi in any meaningful sense. Its closest ancestor is Java, via the short lived "J++" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B

(Android later did basically the same thing with Dalvik)

I think the parent comment meant "philosophically" based on Delphi since Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of C#, was also the creator of Turbo Pascal and chief architect of Delphi. He left Borland for Microsoft in the mid-90s.

Let’s not forget that the original chief architect of Delphi and the lead architect of C# since its beginnings are the same person so I would dare to say there had ro be some influence sneaking in.

Most Delphi devs were hired by Microsoft to build .net. Thats why .NET libs and the Delphi VCL are very very similar.