> Barely related.
> TP was my language for AP computer science in high school and I felt good about it.
I couldn't agree more. Were it not for Turbo Pascal and AP Computer Science, I can't imagine I'd have found myself writing software for a living. Writing code in Turbo Pascal at 7:10 AM in the morning under The Dzwon[0] was the best part of my childhood.
The language was amazing. For the first time in my life, I could instruct a computer to do something, hit F6 (I think) and get an executable file. It was like magic to my 8th grade eyes[1]. I remember hacking a BBS together and being frustrated at the paint speed, investigating, and discovering that I could just use inline assembly to write characters to the screen. The IDE had syntax highlighting, a compiler, and the standard library all fit on a floppy disk along with the source code we wrote in class. We learned on non-networked, IIRC IBM PS/2 512MB PCs with two internal 3.5" floppy drives and no hard disks.
It amazed me when I began my career at a telecom -- as a member of "IT Support" at the time -- that my first big project was installing Microsoft Visual Studio on 20 developer PCs so they could write code in Visual Basic. I hadn't been writing code professionally at that point but still tinkered in Borland Pascal with a little C++ and I'm thinking ... the professional world picked BASIC? Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. In reality, we wrote nothing in VB; it was a one-off. And I also had no idea, at the time, exactly what "Visual Basic" was. I was just picturing that language my buddies with "Commodore 64"s used. In a lot of ways, VB and Pascal shared some things that aren't common in C-like langauges -- they both defaulted to case insensitive string comparisons and code[2].
[0] Over the years I've come to discover that HS Programming teachers tend to be a bit off. Ours was a single man who took off two weeks before the last day of school to spend his summer traveling internationally to places that aren't known for being tourist friendly.
[1] I had an odd childhood. My Dad and I built a PC a few years prior and he started a business for me to do so for others. We'd put in a bid to the district for a tech refresh. The CS teacher saw the name on the bid, realized he had my sister in class, talked to her and found out about me. I was invited to take the AP CS class over at the HS in exchange for an earlier morning, walking over to the JHS afterward as my "1st Hour".
[2] Gosh, it's been so long, I'm second-guessing that statement. I remember keywords and the like were not case sensitive and a few of us took to capitalizing them, making it look like our programs were yelling a lot but I had only passing exposure to VB in the form of VBS and (a lot less) VBA so it escapes me.
TP was my language for AP computer science in high school and I felt good about it. The current FreePascal implements features a dos-looking IDE that worked almost seamlessly over SSH and gave it a nice retro feel.
But the retro feel got old after a few days. I found my TP solutions to advent of code verbose. Just the amount of typing you had to do to achieve what can be a python 2 liner was astounding in retrospect. I don’t often think about the programming efficiency of languages themselves but man I didn’t have time to do AOC in TP but I do have time to do it in python.