Turbo Pascal was the first "real" programming language I learned past 6809E ASM, structured basic flavors and batch/shell back in the very late 80s. When I went

Turbo Pascal was the first "real" programming language I learned past 6809E ASM, structured basic flavors and batch/shell back in the very late 80s. When I went to college for CS in the early 90s, they were still teaching the first year of classes in Borland Pascal so that turned out to be very useful experience. A few years later, my Pascal background sailed me into a half-decade stint as a custom app dev working with Delphi. That, in turn, led to a job at Borland testing the Kylix and C++Builder IDEs. Good times. I still miss Delphi. Nowadays it's normal to have IDE plugins to the point it's a dealbreaker if they don't exist. But at the time the idea of a component library and coding environment that was easily extensible in its own language was pure magic. I had so much fun playing with both VCL and the IDE itself. It's a shame Borland left the grassroots devs behind in their quest for the enterprise market, and more or less killed any growth in community adoption. It was a really cool setup, at least through Delphi 7 or so.