My Delphi Experience
Is admittedly limited to having an office mate who was gaga for it and gave me several forced demos. At the superficial level it sure seemed like a 4GL kind of thing that generated code.
I could be wrong.
Also, I have a little experience with Object Pascal from MacApp days. Its still an "emulated" OO language in the spirit of C++ and Java rather than a dynamic one in the spirit of Smalltalk and ObjectiveC. Which means I don't much care for it on a conceptual level.
My third bias against it is that it runs on PCs - something I've never cared to work on. Unix servers are pretty much the only place I ply my trade. I've heard Delphi now works on Linux? But that would reqire me to buy a PC and I have no use for PCs. I'm quite happy with OSX.
Why I think Cocoa is the coolest thing:
The NextStep UI Builder (called InterfaceBuilder or IB) is radical in what it does. You actually visually assemble objects together - they don't have to be UI objects either. Once you create an assembly (this thingy connects to that doodad via this property and sends this message on getting this event....) it *serializes* the set of objects into a file (called a nib file for the extension used). Usually this is a window with widgets and your home-made controller class and maybe some model objects. Doesn't have to be though.
So when you want a new instance of that window (or other kind of assembly), you reinflate the nib again. The nib acts as a sort of template.
This means you don't subclass nearly as much in Cocoa programming (hardly ever actually). Instead, you just assemble stuff. This is kind of what Java beans wanted to do with its serialization and stuff, but Sun messed it up and the implementors couldn't get their head around real serialization so they all punted and did code generation.
I also think they sort of had to because of Java's static binding nature.
