Maybe I’m just projecting my own childhood as a universal case, but for a computer passionate teenager, Turbo Pascal was pretty much the sweet spot between kids tools like Basic (particularly pre qbasic if my memory serves) and C which I admit was still inscrutable to me. I’m trying to teach my middle school kids the fun side of programming and 35 years later I can’t find an IDE as perfectly integrated for debugging as I had in Turbo Pascal 5.

The folks I always had mad respect for were those who could write in assembly on their Commodores, etc… I never had one of those machines but I still bow my head to those who could write anything meaningful in pure assembly as a teenager in the pre internet era when you had to figure out so much more on your own.