Delphi is probably the best, but I can't afford it. Lazarus is pretty good, except for the documentation, which needs a huge refactoring effort.
You can put together small applications in minutes.
You can put together small applications in minutes.
That's a good point about popular languages, but you can't complain about Dephi's staying power. Wikipedia shows it as having been released in 1995, and it still seems to be going!
Yes, but it's only really alive due to legacy systems. You don't often see new development done on it, at least in the US. Good luck finding a Delphi developer vs. Java or C#. I think it's still popular in Eastern Europe though.
I do love the platform and I used it for probably 13 years, but it's wilting pretty hard today. I would never build anything of substance with it today.
Lazarus is free, but due to the way their help files are build, incremental improvements in it are impossible, so it's just a list of arguments for functions, with no real explanations.