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For me turbo pascal - with inline assembly - was the pinnacle. I got into c and later c++ because I had to, but always found the symbols slightly harder on the eyes and surprisingly not faster to type. And I was always frustrated by the bloat of the executables and the much slower compilation times. And the runtime speed - I was doing a lot of assembly, it was something I became interested in even on projects that didn’t need it - was actually much faster in TP. It was, in my eyes, the perfect blend of easy on the eyes syntax, blazingly fast compilation and runtime and small easy to share executables.

Then of course Delphi came along and made all that true for windows apps too!

So somehow I chime with how your comment starts but have such different memories of how it ends :)

I am so glad to have had the luck to learn coding via various BASIC flavours, Turbo Pascal, Z80, 8086 Assembly before getting into C and C++, as I wasn't tainted about C being God's revelation for systems programming, that many seem to have.

After learning C, I quickly switched to C++, alongside Pascal, and stayed on Borland ecosystem until Visual C++ 6.0 came to be, followed by .NET.

On UNIX, C++ was my Typescript for C, as back then there wasn't FreePascal, and most Pascal implementations for UNIX sucked, plain standard Pascal, or P2C.

I also had the pleasure to have a myriad of other programming languages, including Oberon, yes it was rather cool for its time.

The way most modern languages have gone back to Pascal style development feels quite enjoyable.

I usually install Lazarus on my pc though seldom use it now. Still want to pick it up someday to compensate my miss in childhood. Only used turbo C then.

My first experience with Pascal was only a few years ago by way of Lazarus which is now my go-to tool whenever I need to build a GUI for myself. Genuinely enjoy it and find it a much more pleasant experience than C. I'm sort of sad I missed the heyday of the Borland tooling because it seems incredibly productive even without nostalgia.

> Then again, I'm working on games for C64, so nostalgia does things to a body.

You should check out Turbo Rascal (...), but you probably already did.

https://lemonspawn.com/turbo-rascal-syntax-error-expected-bu... (outdated cert)

https://github.com/leuat/TRSE/

What's terribly unfortunate about those components is that they are in fact part of the dev environment. I really wish they were fully contained in the project and then dynamically loaded along with it. GetIt ever so slightly improved the situation, but still. At this point basically nothing else could get me to ever upgrade anymore. Lazarus doesn't do any better, but there at least you could vendor the entire IDE.

> nowadays it places an unneeded toll on the shift and caps lock keys and makes coding a bit more tedious

Right. But there are evolutions of Oberon without these orthodoxies (e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/oberon or https://github.com/rochus-keller/micron) and a few additional features which make it a really powerful but still lean language.

The version which I would really like to see would be a native distribution for the Raspberry Pi of the Oberon Workstation environment --- apparently there is a problem with the drivers which makes porting difficult.

I suppose it's just imagery from the heyday of Wirth's Oberon, ca 1987.

BTW Oberon was / is not just a language, but a whole very interesting interactive computing environment.

I think some of the devs are Russian and a quick scan of the video doesn't show anything other than a shared screen for the bulk of the time (using the mouse to grab the time pointer and move it quickly through the length of the presentation).

> Extremely poor taste.

How so?

They use Yandex for e-mail, so probably a Russian group behind this.