Delphi 2 was my introduction to programming. It was on a pirate CD-ROM together with many other programs - Office, C++ Builder, Visual Studio. Once I discovered

Delphi 2 was my introduction to programming. It was on a pirate CD-ROM together with many other programs - Office, C++ Builder, Visual Studio. Once I discovered it (because of course I'd play with all the programs on the pirate CD), I was amazed. At the time I didn't know of an easier way to draw windows and buttons and stuff, and have them do what you expect them to do (Visual Basic? Pfft, edgy, tweenage me scoffed at the idea of compiling pseudocode that had to be interpreted at runtime. And don't tell tweenage me about MFC, past me would never have admitted that using the MS foundation classes in C++ was too difficult for my dumb brain. I also didn't "get" C++ so couldn't get on with Borland's C++ builder. But object pascal... object pascal was structured and easy to understand and compiled to machine code in an eyeblink so was therefore superior to everything else!!! Man, what a butt I was...) First program I wrote and released was a game editor. Someone had reverse engineered a certain video game's file and data structure and documented the offsets and sizes of all the stats of the entities in the game. I used that information and slapped a shitty GUI with comboboxes and dropdown lists and number fields (with no bounds checking I think), together with some very dodgy file read/write code I part copied from some geocities page and part copied from some reference book code, and I made my first game editor. People actually used it! Man, that felt cool. Man, what a butt I was, I was the very definition of an "I am a programmer" meme. Later on that information made its way into a UGE module so my program was no longer relevant. I remember borrowing Delphi reference books from the library and, not having enough computer time, hand writing my code to learn. Good times. I didn't know Delphi was still in use, I am obviously not in the development line anymore. 26 years! I feel old!