There's a new version coming out soon.
-- David. (I work there.)
I cut my programming teeth on Turbo Pascal and Delphi 20 years ago, so I thought I'd help a friends daughter with her homework assignment.
Could not even figure out how to create a project. I mean honestly, as a professional SW dev I could not even create a project to contain her working files, so was unable to open and close delphi and still run the files we were working on.
No info tips to help figure out what all the GUI widgets do. Had to google all the stupid things. No decent property inspection of the resulting widgets. No layout managers, still uses pixel position layouts.
I was originally in favour of our education system continuining to use it, now I'm solidly in favour of switching to Python.
> as a professional SW dev I could not even create a project to contain her working files
I work as a product manager, and one of my aims is usability. I'm very interested in the problems you faced, in order to solve them. Could you reply, or drop me an email at david dot millington @embarcadero.com please? I am always interested in talking to users.
In the meantime, to get you going: When you start, the IDE's default blank state (the Welcome screen) has buttons to create a new project. Or, you can go to the File > New menu, and choose a Windows (VCL) or cross-platform app.
> No info tips to help figure out what all the GUI widgets do.
You are right, that may be assumed knowledge, and the names are often tied to the WinAPI progenitors of the modern day controls.
> No decent property inspection of the resulting widgets.
What is "decent" property inspection? The Object Inspector is a dockable window, shown by default when designing (default position is the bottom left of the screen.) It lists all properties and events, and is similar to Visual Studio.
> I'm solidly in favour of switching to Python.
I'm sorry to hear that. As I said, one of my roles is to improve usability and discoverability, and I'd really appreciate it if you'd share the issues you encountered. For context, I've spoken to six customers in the past fortnight about the upcoming beta release, focusing on UX, so this is something we do regularly and is a genuine offer.