Hacker News Reader

For me TurboPascal set the standard for power and ease of learning. The IDE was fast and solid.

It would work if you were a newbie and grow with you as you got more advanced. The language manuals were well written and in places quite funny.

Compile time was ultra fast, and if you wanted to go deeper you could. (assembly).

I dont know of any popular IDE right now that is as complete and easy to use.

View on HN

The QBASIC/QuickBASIC IDE was also quite good for its time. Either way, there's still nothing quite like it on modern systems. There are a few terminal text editors with intuitive TUI's and key bindings, but none of them provides the full IDE featureset and easy access to documentation that these tools had. (Hopefully we'll get there at some point. Perhaps by starting from the codebase of a modern GUI editor like lapce and providing a TUI frontend to expose the same features.)

Is the FreePascal IDE essentially a clone of the TurboPascal IDE, or does it have any shortcomings?

It's a very close look-a-like and it works quite well in practice but the codebase is quite messy, with many things still being based on old MS-DOG and its quirks. Would need a ton of refactoring to make it more extensible on modern systems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com