Retrospective on Borland Turbo Pascal 7
Archived — this story has rotated out of today’s deck. It is kept here in full.
The gist
Developer Kevin Boone published a retrospective calling Turbo Pascal 7 the pinnacle and end of the line.
The tool that eased 90s Windows programming still draws developer nostalgia.
Background
Turbo Pascal was a programming tool from Borland, the software company that later replaced it with Delphi. Kevin Boone, author of the retrospective on kevinboone.me, writes that Turbo Pascal was one of the most successful programming tools of all time and introduced techniques such as integrated source-level debugging that were radical at the time. He argues it was much easier to program for Windows with Turbo Pascal 7 than with anything else, and that he used it to write medical imaging software in the 90s to run under Windows 3.1. The piece resurfaced on Hacker News, a tech discussion site, where it was submitted by user andsoitis.
How it unfolded
- 1970Pascal, designed by Niklaus Wirth, was published; it was named in honor of French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal.
- 1995Borland halted development of Turbo Pascal and replaced it with Delphi, based on Object Pascal.
- Nov 7, 2026Kevin Boone's retrospective "They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pascal 7" was submitted to Hacker News by user andsoitis.
Key terms
- Turbo Pascal
- A software development system with a compiler and IDE for the Pascal programming language, originally developed at Borland.
- Delphi
- A general-purpose programming language and IDE using the Object Pascal dialect for rapid application development.
- Pascal
- An imperative and procedural programming language designed by Niklaus Wirth to encourage structured programming and good practices.
Source: Wikipedia
Who’s saying what
- Expert
- Boone calls Turbo Pascal 7 the pinnacle and the end of the Turbo Pascal line, and says it was much easier for Windows programming than anything else at the time.
- Expert
- Boone says it is not much of an exaggeration to claim Turbo Pascal contributed to the widespread uptake and eventual domination of Microsoft Windows on desktop PCs.
- Caution
- A Steemit post by kulin12 says the graphics libraries' performance is not satisfactory.
- Support
- The same Steemit post notes some teachers prefer Turbo Pascal 7 or Turbo Pascal 5.5 because they are simpler than modern IDEs such as Visual Studio or Borland JBuilder.
Still unverified
Kevin Boone states as his recollection that Borland introduced an object-oriented programming library for Microsoft Windows before Microsoft did, and that Borland's was better.