[masterponomo]

I attended a Clipper user group in Atlanta in the mid 1990's, with my dad. He was into Clipper, was trying to get me interested. The Clipper folks were also into Turbo Pascal. A Borland rep was there to give out swag and talk up the imminent release of Borland Delphi. The Clipper crowd was divided--some excited, some not so much. The older guys, like my dad, had come up programming with punched cards and tape drives. For them, a PC with Clipper and Turbo Pascal was plenty advanced enough for small business apps. Dad never did go for Delphi. 20+ years later, I'm doing a quick study of Object Pascal to prep for working on a legacy application at my work, in Delphi.

[mike_hearn]

Hah, that's how I started programming too. A bit of BASIC. Then I graduated to Clipper and Turbo Pascal because that's what my dad used. Then to Delphi 1.0, then 2.0, I think we skipped 3. Delphi 4 was a mess. Quality got pretty variable in the later releases.

Imagine being 14 and trying to understand CORBA.

[mmargerum]

I used Clipper back in the day. CA ruined it when they bought it. I was waiting for CA's new product "visual objects" in the meantime Delphi shipped and I've been using it since Delphi 1. I think it's unparalleled for building desktop applications for Mac and windows.

[pjmlp]

You brought me back in time.

Turbo Pascal 6.0/TASM for applications that required performance or system programming like, and Clipper Summer '87 (shortly replaced by the 5.0 OOP version) for database frontends.