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I absolutely loved Turbo Pascal as a kid and hold that IDE as the golden standard still to this day because of its simplicity. I think what we need isn't visual tools, we need an extremely simple IDE where you press one button (F5) to run your program without leaving the environment and without any clutter.

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The modern FreePascal stack includes a very similar text-based IDE; and FreeDOS still provides RHIDE for C programming. It would be nice to have a modern clone of these vintage IDE's with full support for language-independent tools like LSP, treesitter and the common debug protocol. From what I can gather, such a tool would be highly usable, e.g. over SSH connections that still work with a terminal-like UX, even for novice users who might be less familiar with tools like Vim.

I wonder if Turbo Pascal was any easier to get started with than Rust would be with the right GUI toolkit and IDE.

There's also some ongoing work on Rust REPL, see https://github.com/google/evcxr - though it's still a bit of a hack. Might become even easier than Turbo Pascal itself, and comparable to home computer BASICs.

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