John Gruber in a post on the passing of Niklaus Wirth:

Most of the apps that established the Macintosh as the platform for people with good taste in the 1980s and early 1990s were written in Pascal. THINK Pascal was an IDE years — maybe over a decade — ahead of its time.

THINK Pascal really was amazing. I’ve got fond memories of that era, reading Inside Macintosh books at the cafe or school and going home to tinker in THINK Pascal at night.

S Koren

I still have my Think Pascal floppies somewhere…

Manton Reece

@Archimage I have a feeling I might too… I still have a lot of old computer stuff that I can’t possibly ever use again. 🙂

Leon Mika

Pascal was a pretty nice language. Not sure if you heard of Delphi but it sounds to me like it's the Windows equivalent to THINK Pascal. I was a heavy user of Delphi. It was my first language after BASIC and I loved working with it.

Manton Reece

@lmika I had heard of Delphi but never used it. In high school we had Turbo Pascal on old PCs.

Odd-Egil “Oddzthrash” Auran

@lmika In school we used Scandis Pascal (a turtle graphics pascal), and Turbo Pascal 3.xx, then TP 4.0. I later dabbled in Delphi a bit, but had to much else to do so I lost interest, but I’ll always remember my Pascal days with joy. I’ve never been around Apple computers until 2011, so never had the opportunity to try a Pascal IDE there.

S Koren

ditto. Sometimes I wish I’d kept some of the hardware.

Vincent Van Dinsky

@manton Let's Cook Textured Vegetable Protein

David Sinclair

I used Pascal for an embarrassingly long time. Starting with Apple Pascal for the Apple ][, though not much of that. My first apps (before they were called apps) were written in Lightspeed Pascal on my Mac Plus back around 1988ish, which became THINK Pascal. Then later used Apple’s MPW Pascal, and CodeWarrior Pascal. Later still, FreePascal (FPC), which I used for a consulting job until 2010 or so. I never did much in C, until Objective-C came along. Pascal a good language; in many ways, Swift has as much in common with Pascal as with ObjC.

Numeric Citizen

I have great memories with Pascal in general… did a semester work using "Prototyper" which was a Pascal code generator… Pascal was a very easy to learn language.

Adam

@manton @amoroso The programming language you were supposed to learn first. To learn good habits.

Manton Reece @manton
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