I moved from Turbo Pascal and Delphi to FreePascal and Lazarus. I write business application software; mostly inventory and sales stuff. Pascal was popularize

I moved from Turbo Pascal and Delphi to FreePascal and Lazarus. I write business application software; mostly inventory and sales stuff. Pascal was popularized by Borland, who sold a complete develpment environment that was tiny, fast, well-documented, and dirt cheap. They got rich doing that. Delphi cost more, but it did a lot more... and then they started jacking the price of Delphi into Twilight Zone territory; over a thousand dollars if you wanted the necessary "add-on" bits that you really needed to make it work. That, and other bad business decisions, killed Borland, and put Pascal itself in the shadows, as they'd pretty much dominated that market. Anders Hejlsberg, who had written both Turbo and Delphi, eloped to Microsoft to work on Visual BASIC. Besides the price, there was Borland's "upgrade" policy. At first, existing Borland product owners could upgrade for a nominal price. The price kept going up, and upgrades started coming faster. New versions were just incompatible enough to be a hassle. Finally, for the piece de resistance, they started running full-page ads begging Microsoft compiler owners to "upgrade" to Borland for less than what they were shafting their own customers for. That's when I, and apparently a whole lot of other programmers, decided to part ways with Borland.