I still have a warm spot in my heart for Delphi. When I bought a license for Delphi 1.0 running on Windows 3.1, it was like a revelation to me. Having previously used Borland Pascal on DOS, I found it unbelievable how easy developing Windows UIs can be. I developed a 16-bit business app (accounting, inventory management, customer records) on Delphi 1.0 which is still running today (you need a 32 bit version of Windows 7 though). The bundled Borland Database Engine (Paradox desktop) was decent enough for structured data management in a single-user application. The best feature was the compiler that sprinted through my source code, turning it into a statically linked executable in mere seconds (on a Pentium 60).

While I have long moved on from Pascal, many great ideas of Delphi live on in C# and Typescript.