The problem I had with Delphi was Embarcardero's pricing. At the time I was looking into it there was no express license or anything similar so it would've been a few hundred dollars to just try and learn. Contrast that with Visual Studio Express which was free and allowed me to learn C#. There was a significant cost to learning Delphi. Since then, however, I discovered Free Pascal and its ability to support multiple platforms and targets. Granted, I abandoned my journey of learning Object Pascal a long time ago.