Turbo Pascal was a glorious tool for my imaginative 15-year-old brain. The first programs I sold were all written in Turbo Pascal. I had the Turbo Pascal reference books near my bedside, and I wish I still had them because they were dog-eared, post-it noted, margin-scribbled, and it's kind of strange but those books guided my future almost more than any other written text.

One distinct memory stands out. I could not wrap my mind around the Object-Oriented extensions on Pascal. I read, re-read, and re-re-read the section of the book describing what polymorhpism is and how it worked, probably at least a dozen times. Somehow it seemed really important and I kept coming back to it. I worked the examples. And then one day the ah-hah moment arrived. I remember it felt like a shock, why it was useful and what I could do with it. I promptly used my knowledge to write a new game using OOP principles to guide the rudimentary "characters" of various geometric shapes at the core of the game.

Fun times, and very formative to me!

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icanhasjonas 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Turbo Pascal and Broland Pascal .. the memories - we used to compete in the demo scenes in Scandinavia back in the day, and even though most of our hot paths where assembly and close to illegal instructions that would crash certain cpu steppings, we would always boot the code from .pas .. and the low hanging fruit was always pascal..

All of our competitors were mostly pure asm or c combo..

Thanks for posting that comment! Made me smile and reminisce

	▲	47282847 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Broland! Thanks for the (unintended?) chuckle.

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jasomill 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

MacApp provided me with an crash course in Object Pascal, just in time for Apple to throw it all away in favor of C++. Fortunately I was a voracious reader of programming language books at the time, so I was already familiar with OO concepts from learning about languages like Smalltalk that I never had a chance to use at the time.

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malux85 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

me too, with pointers in C, I would have been about 10 at the time, 1995 with DJGPP in DOS! I still remember that feeling when it clicked

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nurettin a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Similar experience here. I'd try to understand a concept in the help file, give up, try again the next year and suddenly it clicks. Maybe that's just how the human brain develops.

	▲	enneff a day ago \| parent [-]
		I really didn’t get it either until I saw how all the good programs were organised as struct types and groups of functions that operate on those structs. Then I was like “oh so OOP just makes that more convenient.” But I couldn’t have realised that until I understood the difference between a well-written program and a bad one. If only I’d had access to as much source code then as I do now!