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Turbo Pascal is a language I've never used professionally but always has a special place in my heart. I grew up poor without any kind of a computer but always considered computers "fun". As a high school senior (1995) I took what I thought was just another computer class; they were teaching Turbo Pascal, and I immediately knew I discovered my life's passion.

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Same for me. I learned most of my programming in high school in our computing classes using Turbo Pascal. I would finish the classwork in a manner of minutes and spend the rest of the time writing games and other software. Our teacher didn't mind us playing games as long as we wrote it ourselves.

I still have 2 post-it notes on my second monitor from when I decided to finally deep dive into the Android Framework.

One says "1988 Pascal", the other one "2018 Kotlin". I wrote those after noticing how similar the syntax is for variable declaration and it felt like going back to my roots.

The sheer joy of knowing your IDE, the language and the target platform all in one interface reminds me a lot of the days staring at the blue screen of Borland Turbo Pascal in the early 90s. I really missed it in all those years of web development I did afterwards.

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