You mentioning Delphi reminds me of the Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, a large model railroad with a day/night cycle, cars driving on the roads and planes "landing" and "taking off", a lot of it controlled with Delphi: https://www.embarcadero.com/case-study/miniatur-wunderland-c...

A video of their control center with English subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9SGsxauu7o

I dont even want to imagine how that codebase looks. The delphi code I‘ve come into contact with (not a delphi dev myself but worked close to them) tended to be quite bad by modern standards. The reason why was generally similar: not very experienced devs in the 90s needed to something with a UI off the ground.

More important was the lack of refactoring support, I think. The ordering and circulatory constraints on source choice also didn't help.

> it lives on as Delphi

Regrettably, Delphi is closer to a zombie now than to something that's alive.

Its true. I think the brain drain has had a severe impact on the evolution of the language as it exists in Delphi. However, some implementations, such as Oxygene, appear to evolve rapidly.

It also lives on as .NET and C#, at least a little bit.

and Typescript....