Learn Pascal on an Osborne-1. First project was a device driver - a classroom project no less! Having coded in lots of languages since then, I like Pascal for

Learn Pascal on an Osborne-1. First project was a device driver - a classroom project no less! Having coded in lots of languages since then, I like Pascal for its structure, its rigour, and uncomplicated binaries and installation. I dont mind if IDE setup is hard as long as anything i build is easily shared with others. Was easier and faster to get Lazarus working on my Mac than Visual Studio 2015 on my Windows (T440p) laptop! FPK/Delphi hands down winner - the only thing easier to share is probably DOS batch scripts. Recently look at some Go code and thought it looked like simplified pascal. LOL. Agree with the other posters that pascal wasnt ever 'cool' because when it was being used for cool-stuff like writing MacOS it wasnt widely publicised, and unfortunately it was used as a learning language (and lets face it not many of us remember school as being uber-cool!). There are precious few languages that can be used for learning and for getting real work done - but if you look at those, they have been around for a long time: Fortran, COBOL, C, Pascal, Lisp. On another note i look at the code, and platforms, and I think that Pascal has an opportunity to be used in IoT applications. Small footprint objects are well suited to constrained environments like my own projects (Arduino, Pi, CHiP, Xbee) where one also needs a compiler that helps to keep the world safe from my bad code (like strict types and pointer bounds!). The folks working on FPK and with Lazarus have done a superb job. Great tools, amazing cross platform support, and delivering stuff that helps get things done.