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Comment by ibejoeb | Hacker News Reader

I loved Delphi. And Borland and Borland-progeny products.

I have a shrink-wrapped box of Turbo Pascal 7 for DOS.

It's been long enough since physical acquisition of software that I'm not even sure how to say that. "Box of Turbo Pascal" seems awkward.

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A gift (c. 1997?) from my parents of a "box" of Turbo Pascal is easily one of the most influential moments of my life. It was such a great programming environment and the docs (books!) were fantastic and quite accessible. I'm still chasing the dragon of the feeling of programming I had back then.

Absolutely. The rapid feedback from the near instant compile was so addictive. I would be in flow state for so long. If only I knew about unit tests back then.

I really only get that these days with toy challenge problems. That might also have a lot to do with the nature of programming now. So much is based on googling known solutions and scouring examples, etc. Probably a better use of time, but you don't get the ego trip of feeling like a wizard.

The first version wasn't even a box - a paperback book with floppy disks. Imagine that - printed documentation!

My first foray into programming was reading the GW BASIC manual and then asking my father whether he could get me GW BASIC; I got QBasic instead, which nicely integrated all the text from that tome in the IDE. Right now I wonder what children will start with and how it would compare to my journey. Personally I feel, while JS in a browser is so much more capable, it's all but beginner-friendly and its main benefit to beginners is just ubiquity.

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