Why would anyone use Delphi these days? Except the case of maintaining legacy code.
Language-wise, UI design-time lets you execute code such as db queries while designing your screens. It is almost completely orthogonal. It has no GC which makes for a faster runtime and writing free in finally is not something that is easy to forget (remember orthogonal) and immediately jumps out as an error when skimming code. Data modules enforce a separation of concerns, visually seeing component properties enables another form of remembering setup parameters.
Tooling-wise, you have runtime stack traces thanks to jedi library. It can show memory leaks on shutdown by enabling a flag. You have package manager baked into the UI, compiler is blazingly fast and generates fast executables.
With all this, for example, you could concoct a db editor easily in a few hours.
http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Rio/en/Compiler_Ver...
There no reason not to use Delphi for this project - it compiles really fast and natively, it allows me to make nice UI fast without limits, I've got a lot of reusable code.
- very fast compile times
- great backwards compatibility
- non programmers can create simple programs
How good was Delphi at hiding MS-DOS quirks? I know C from that platform tended to be nonstandard with near and far pointers to accommodate memory segmentation, but was Delphi any better?
Which meant that as long as you didn't have to call C functions you just had to know and write that "it's a pointer" and nothing more.
What does that mean? You can be a non programmer and make simple programs in most general purpose programming languages.
Are you talking about the VCL library? In that case, there are many other languages that include the same like C# for example.
Though, iirc, Delphi is really expensive as a product.