Uh, I think you mean "way, way better than Delphi 7 in every conceivable way." Seriously, have you tried to use Delphi 7 recently?
Have been using it for over a decade, and seriously i'm only comparing to it because it's the only other pascal IDE with language&debugger integration there is to compare to.
Make no mistake, it's quite crusty and i had to tweak WINE in a rather unpleasant way to make it usable.
However, compared to it Lazarus still lacks some vital features like multiple source editor window support (how would you manage a project with 100 of files without that?).
Not all is lost - i've been giving Lazarus a try every couple years, and this time it's actually looking pretty good - nice, modern IDE, great code tools, works without crutches.
Pretty much the only show stopper is the scaling - give me a way to work comfortably on a hundred file project in Lazarus, and Delphi 7 would go down the drain.
I suppose in your perfect world we'd all still be using Turbo Pascal on DOS? 
Good horrors, no.
I wouldn't go back to TP7 and TMT pascal even if i was paid to.
I don't like object oriented syntax of both C++ and Pascal, it's ugly and does not fit the languages.
So, i would have cut it down to the parts that enable defining abstract types, and no more - constructor, destructor, operator overload. Things you need to implement a string type, a dynamic array, a big integer, etc.
On the missing features, i would have liked to see C++ style code templates added - these save a lot of copy-pasting.
there are simply far too many people who for whatever reason view ancient IDEs/Compilers through rose-tinted lenses.
Honestly, seeing where Borland went after D7, i'm not too surprised.
Recent
