Simplicity isn't simple – Delphi's design principles

Oh god, I get a Proustian flashbacks to my first programming steps just by looking at that Pascal assignment operator.

Delphi was wonderful. I remember showing it to an early colleague of mine who has only done C++ and he insisted that it had to be an interpreted language - because compile times were (what he thought to be) simply impossibly short.

"I don’t mind requiring two lines of code to accomplish what could be accomplished in one line if I can understand both lines." -- is very true. Even though I don't agree with some of the other things he says. I am not a fan of properties and I like the . vs -> difference which immediately tells you whether something is a pointer. And the notion that you can have the language with pointers and hide if rom the user, I find that questionable.

Interesting - I've always thought Delphi was easier to use than many other systems, but could never put my finger on why. It seems they thought about it a lot at the beginning in a hundred little ways.