I remember turbo pascal circa 1988 and I liked it way better than C. I rewrote a chunk of the standard library so it would take advantage of 16 bit instructions on my 286.
I used Turbo Pascal on CP/M-80. It wasn't just a little bit better than everything else out there, it was a real revolution. For I think $99 you got a solid integrated editor/IDE and a very fast compiler for a real language (not a toy like Tiny-C or whatever) that produced executables you could share. And it ran great in about 48KB (not GB...not MB) on a processor running between 1-4MHz. Good times.