I had the opposite experience as I love(d) Pascal but I never did warm to Delphi quite as much. Borland's IDEs were amazing though - for a long time I preferred Delphi's IDE over Visual Studio. And as for Turbo Pascal; even now I look upon that as one of the greatest IDEs ever released.
Turbo Vision (and the entire TP6 package) was an amazing environment. I think TurboVision in particular was helped by the fact it was Borland's productized version of the framework they used for the IDE itself.
As a point of contrast, Microsoft shipped a similar sort of TUI framework with its Microsoft BASIC 'Professional Development System'. The PDS was Microsoft's original BASIC compiler (BASCOM) that'd had been integrated with the QuickBASIC (4.5?) IDE. In addition to the compiler, the PDS had direct ISAM support and a few other higher end features targeted at people writing enterprise line of business apps.
The TUI framework was their attempt to allow developers using the PDS to write applications in the same visual style as the IDE itself. However, due to the fact that the underlying BASIC language had neither objects nor function pointers, there was no way to implement any sort of callback model in the API. The net result was a framework that required huge amounts of boilerplate code to get anything done and was virtually impossible to use. So, while TurboVision was a bit harder to wrap your head around, it at least had the benefit of being actually commercially useful once you did.
This is a big part of why I tend to strongly prefer development tools that are actually used by their developers. The incentives are aligned.
I couldn't agree more. This is also the reason some programming languages eventually write their compiler in their own language. The phrase 'eating your own dog food' often gets used to describe the process.
That phrase came to my mind as I was writing. My first exposure to the term came in the context of Dave Cutler's requirement that Windows NT developers 'eat their own dogfood'... so it's a little ironic to me that one of my big complaints about the MS BASIC PDS is that they seemingly didn't.
