I took over maintenance of an in-house application written in Delphi/ObjectPascal about 18 months ago (as one of my many tasks - I have spent maybe one or two weeks working on it since), and I thought Lazarus was a neat way of getting me started, having no prior Pascal experience whatsoever. Alas, the IDE crashed on me so frequently both under GNU/Linux and OS X that I gave up within a couple of days. Either it is not very stable or I was mistreating it somehow, although I don't know how.

The documentation was very helpful, though, in getting to know Pascal. Taking over maintenance of an application written in a languange you can read but hardly write (whatever bad things people might be tempted to say about Pascal, cryptic syntax is not among them, I am certain) is a strange process.