How to use Borland Delphi – training video excerpt from the 1990s

I learned some basic Pascal in high school. One of my first gigs a bunch of years later introduced me to Delphi, which of course was when RAD (Rapid Application Development) was the new buzz phrase required on the resume.

To me, Delphi was Pascal embracing a few Lisp features. And appearance-wise, it looked like a cross between C and Logo. Pretty wild. Quite slobberproof.

It was a little too verbose for my tastes (although I think most OOP gets that way), but how much you could accomplish without having to continually refer to the manual was quite refreshing. Everything we did in our little shop was constantly being rewritten, so none of us were convinced about the rapid development concept. Rapid getting-to-a-good-mockup for sure, though.

I recall Delphi had garbage collection, but was incredibly bad at it. Kinda like how it is easy to blow the Lisp stack if you don't pay attention to your loops, Delphi seemed to constantly run out of memory, even if the application wasn't particularly extravagant.

Is RAD still a thing? Or is it just assumed in prototyping these days?

EDIT: Trivia - The Greek Delphi was previously known as Pytho. Imagine the name clash that could have created when Python came about.

I loved Delphi at the time. It's closest competitor was Visual Basic.