I loved Turbo Pascal, then Delphi. It was the most productive I've ever been as a programmer. I kept upgrading and was a very happy camper, right up to the point where they went insane with their pricing and I couldn't afford to keep going with it. Lazarus is pretty good at filling that gap, except for the horrid documentation.

The knife twist in the back was when Microsoft hired away Anders Hejlsberg and pushed him into the evil that is/was C#. The whole .NET thing was, and will always be, evil and bloat.