Comment by wood_spirit

For me turbo pascal - with inline assembly - was the pinnacle. I got into c and later c++ because I had to, but always found the symbols slightly harder on the eyes and surprisingly not faster to type. And I was always frustrated by the bloat of the executables and the much slower compilation times. And the runtime speed - I was doing a lot of assembly, it was something I became interested in even on projects that didn’t need it - was actually much faster in TP. It was, in my eyes, the perfect blend of easy on the eyes syntax, blazingly fast compilation and runtime and small easy to share executables.

Then of course Delphi came along and made all that true for windows apps too!

So somehow I chime with how your comment starts but have such different memories of how it ends :)