At one point long ago (just for a short while), I thought Delphi was destined to take that place. It was much higher level while still letting you go as low level as you wanted- it didn't have garbage collection but it made it pretty easy to keep track of what is or isn't allocated, on top of having good tools to find leaks on runtime. But it had too many problems too: the Pascal base and the association with drag and drop coders being some of the first ones, followed by a series of bad decisions by whatever company was responsible for it at any given week.