> I was interested in whether it had some unique feature/paradigm, or was it loved for some other reason.
It was so beloved because it actually worked exactly as the marketing slogan at the time claimed: "The power of C++ with the ease of Visual Basic". (Or was it the other way around?)
This was a time when Microsoft's "Visual" Studio IDE was anything but: It had no visual form builder, just a code editor. To actually put something on screen, you had to write reams of code straight out of a Charles Petzold tome. Visual Basic, OTOH, sure did have a nice easy graphical UI builder, but a pathetically weak ultra-high-level language -- in contrast to Object Pascal, which is every bit as high- or as low-level as C++.
I learned all three in an "Object Oriented Programming" course I took in 1995, IIRC in the order 1: OO concepts, 2: C++, 3: VB, 4: Delphi (or was it 2: VB, 3: C++?). After the two preceding, Delphi was a revelation and love at first sight.
That love soured slightly after the Kylix debacle, some more with diverse bugginess and drawn-out implementation of Windows developments (Unicode, 64-bit, High-DPI...), and finally petered out almost totally over the covert "feature moved to higher-priced more Enterprise-y edition" and overt price hikes over the years (decades) since, with the on-again off-again free (gratis) Community Edition shenanigans as perhaps the final nail in the coffin.
But Delphi versions 1 through 7 (1995 -- ca 2005-10) still has, and probably will for ever have, a special place in my heart as my most beloved programming tool. And fortunately, it has a worthy heir in Free Pascal / Lazarus.
Open Notepad, yeah, that classic one from Windows. Look at it, see all its menus, features, behavior. Now ask yourself: How much time would take me to create a clone of it in my preferred IDE/programming language?
Then comeback here and tell me your answer. I will tell you in advance mine: "In Delphi it would take maximum 3 hours". That's the core definition of RAD.
What it did well was data binding of UI controls to SQL databases. A form would be linked to a database viewmodel (ish) where you could drop sql connections and tables to link up to a UI. Delphi (the vcl) took care of everything. You could put an editable grid on a page and all CRUD would _just work_
It was loved because it actually worked well, and the language and runtime features of VCL meant that the code was much, much cleaner than let's say in C++
