The irony is that the present day version of delphi is the best it has ever been, and competitive feature wise with other platforms, but because it has a non-trivial price tag everyone pretends it's defunct. The reality is that the only programming languages which remain are either open source, or the default solution for a mass market OS, and all of them are free. You can't build an entry level dev solution like classic vb or Delphi and sell it to hobbyists these days, so unless some open source developers make it happen for free, it won't happen.
There is Free Pascal[0] and their Lazarus IDE[1], which are free, open source, cross-platform and largely Delphi-compatible – but they still don't seem to be taking the world by storm.
