Tell us more about these nefarious reasons. I remember them existing but I can't remember what they were.
basically their is a cottage industry effect in support of Delphi and "Delphi programmers" got to have themselves some work [again as frequently disclaimed there is a difference between programmer who primarily works with Delphi and the individual who presents themselves as a "Delphi programmer"
back when Delphi was first thrust on schools new text books were needed and comp sci teachers had to go on courses and so on
the routine argument of Delphi as a natural progression from Pascal was naturally made but in the end it really was about giving the examiners at the department a nice opportunity to give their nephews jobs ...
So, as said
here, there is a case for schools and universities to use Delphi to introduce visual programming concepts. The simple reality is that rather than introducing programming earlier at school with something like Scratch (and yes Logo) or pouring resources into the program to enable a broader range of teaching options we have the same stale old DoE saying right we have a problem we needs these computer programmer people coming from school so lets call the people who are entangled with the department for the last 5 years and ask them what they want ...
Borland for years banked on a strategy of appealing to audiences as a Microsoft alternative in the languages department - they touted their C platforms in one vain and put Turbo Pascal forward as both the ultimate
When VB managed to eat into Borland and other proprietary programming suit houses pie and the "easy RAD" mantra started coddling on - more importantly when it was picked up on that while VB produced a lot of bad programs a lot of people who started on VB and outgrew it
Delphi was originally intended to be a suit to build user side interfaces for Oracle backends - all about the database baby ...
BUT then MSSQL started making serious inroads so slight change of strategy from Borland and instead they plowed a TON (and I mean a TON) of money into getting Delphi out in the market through the "educational angle".
Successive sales of companies later and we still have the same Borland proprietary alternative ethos dominating Delphi. The owner company generates revenue from the sale of stale of intellectual property as well as off the back of fresh but not on generated intellectual property (the same routine as academic publishers - but that is another rant - - which generally starts with "you ****ing bastards, boasting as to your charity at giving me 50 complementary access passes to an article that I wrote [well co-wrote] which you sell off to people at 8 USDs a pop" ... lets just say I am a
believer in open access ... but I digress
And again this all comes back to why the question "which programming language should be taught ..." is inherently problematic.