Programming Forums - Who uses Delphi and why?

I know some people who do.

As I understand it, the language Delphi uses (Object Pascal) is roughly equivalent to C++. They both compile to (fast) native code and both are OOP. There's little difference except that O.P. uses keywords where C++ uses symbols ('and', 'or', 'begin', 'end' instead of &, |, {, } etc.) I don't know if it has anything equivalent to C++ templates. O.P. does compile more quickly, but this is not so much an issue on modern machines.

The Delphi IDE is very nice; I think for a long time it was ahead of MS Visual Studio, until MS bought out the lead designer of Delphi to help them with dotNET. Borland also had a product called C++Builder which was the Delphi IDE but with C++ instead of O.P.

There's a free RAD IDE similar to Delphi called Lazarus.

In my opinion, C++ is so popular that there's little point in learning another language that does much the same thing. Judging by the number of abandoned Delphi forums a Google search unearthed, other people think the same. Rather learn a language from a different paradigm, like Lisp, Haskell or Forth.