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Comment by ajuc | Hacker News Reader

I think Turbo Pascal was the perfect language to learn programming. It has a simple core, a static type system without much bells and whistles but that's more solid than the C crazyness, it doesn't force the student to learn 10 different concepts at the same time before writing HelloWorld (unlike Java and other OO languages), but it teaches thinking about types and not only values (unlike scripting languages).

Sadly it's basically dead now.

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After BASIC and LOGO, Turbo Pascal was the first language I became fluent in, during my pre-teens. If I recall correctly, I learned everything from the editor/IDE, help screens, examples, and existing code.

What really accelerated my learning was being given a large codebase (a bulletin-board system) to work on, and seeing how it all fit together to make a running application.

Next was C in my teens, I learned enough to create a little language that controls hardware via serial port, RS232. I remember starting to learn C++ and object-oriented programming.

For some reason, I drifted away from computers after that. Like the author, I found myself in various countries and occupations, always feeling that I had untapped potential and talent, but never able to make the transition.

Fortunately, in my late 30's I rediscovered the joy of programming. The web was the gateway, starting with HTML and CSS. Once I got the hang of it, it was unstoppable - I just kept learning and building more and more every day, because it was so fun. It took a couple years to become a full-time, professional programmer. I picked up server-side languages, released open-source libraries, which led to clients and later co-founding software companies.

A funny thing is, things have come full circle, and now I spend a lot of my time with TypeScript, another creation of Anders Hejlsberg. How the language integrates with the editor (in my case VS Code) to support software development, showing hints, smart autocompletion, navigating type definitions.. It reminds me of Turbo Pascal's IDE in some aspects.

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The past year or so, I've had a lot of fun with Raspberry Pi. It's a perfect hobby, and I'm now re-learning C so I can control hardware. I remember being ten years old, reading a manual on 8086 assembly language. So happy to be back where I started, with that sweet childhood joy of tinkering with computers.

As a senior in HS it was the very first year our school had programming as a class and it was only for Turbo Pascal so I learned the basics of programming through that. It didn't really stick though (at least consciously) and a few years later I ended up self teaching myself PHP then Ruby then JS through necessity/curiosity.

The very next year they changed it to C++ and I wonder how things would have turned out differently had I been a year younger.

and it had an amazing IDE for the times. My first useful programs were written in TP in the late 90-ties.

Turbo Pascal was always technically excellent in many ways, and also relatively affordable. (The Microsoft development tools were prohibitively expensive for most non-businesses.)

IIRC, the IDE started with Turbo Pascal version 4.0.

In earlier versions of Turbo Pascal (at least 3.0 and 2.0), there was no IDE. IRC, TP before 4.0 had some kind of simple text screen for switching between the compiler and a text editor.

I started with a copy of Turbo Pascal 2.0 for generic MS-DOS (generic, in that it didn't use IBM PC BIOS features), which a computer shop owner kindly transferred from 8-inch floppy to the 5.25" oddball format that my not-very-PC-compatible used. The cover of manual was monochrome blue, rather than the more familiar multicolored one. http://www.emsps.com/oldtools/borpasv.htm#tp2

I heard that Philipe Kahn named the company "Borland" because it sounded like an American astronaut name, so I suppose that could be the reason for the outer space theme (other than a lot of computer things having sci-fi space themes around then).

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