Pascal was the first language I played around with after Amiga era BASIC. I still don't really understand why it faded into relative obscurity. To this day, I f

Pascal was the first language I played around with after Amiga era BASIC. I still don't really understand why it faded into relative obscurity. To this day, I feel like it's close to a perfect language. It's fast, it's productive. It's not a "safe" language, but its design from very beginning steered you away from danger. With Lazarus, it is probably the most pain free way to write GUI apps. But more than anything else, it is so, so readable. This is often expressed as criticism: it's verbose. But that verbosity is absolutely a small price to pay for code that is often shockingly easy to understand.