Maybe it is rose-tinted glasses, but I remember having a significantly more pleasant experience working wight the VCL (through C++ Builder) than with Winforms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg
I read that he got $1 million (or more?) for leaving Borland for Microsoft.
He's also worked on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TypeScript
, Microsoft's enhanced version of JavaScript, which has been in the news somewhat lately.
The summary for me is that Delphi was more productive and way better designed than VB with the performance of C. I never understood why it didn't have a broader following. My guess is that developers enjoyed the challenge of C/C++, call it an aesthetic judgement.
I sometimes wonder what Delphi would look like today, had Anders not joined the MS fold.
Long story short, when MS turned the full weight of their organization on Borland and sunk them it opened my eyes to MS's corporate behaviour. That's how I learned that MS always played dirty. It set me out on the road to looking for alternatives to Windows. It's ultimately why I'm writing this in Firefox on Ubuntu.
In ref to the blog post (or whatever it is) I thought Delphi was no more. Just goes to show, here is a link: http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi
From 1997: "Borland International and Microsoft have settled a Borland-launched lawsuit that started on May 7, 1997, in Santa Clara County, CA. In the suit Borland alleged that Microsoft had hired 34 Borland employees over the past 30 months in order to steal Borland trade secrets."
Just WOW. 34 employees.
There's plenty not to forgive Microsoft for. It's just so much cuddlier mow that it's a little desperate.
Delphi worked because they could control the language and mould it to fit the requirements of the VCL and of the IDE. With C++Builder, they had to introduce special proprietary extensions to C++ (which may have been, like Qt, implemented using macros internally, I don't know) such as "__published" and "__closure". Another factor was that Delphi's fast one-pass compiler allowed incredibly fast GUI-development; the "modify, compile, run" cycle could take literally seconds. C++Builder's use of C++ meant this cycle slowed down tremendously, even with tricks such as pre-compiled headers. C++ had other problems. It just wasn't a good idea.
Hejlsberg's C#/.NET design was necessary, although I agree with your other assertions. As far as I know, .NET was never able to replicate Delphi's genius, and a one-platform, proprietary language was a bad idea even back then.