[CRConrad]

> WYSIWYG GUI design tools like old school Visual Basic (terrible language, but UI the designer is still unequaled)

It was equalled and surpassed only a few years later, by Borland Delphi.

[api]

Never used that one, but Pascal would certainly have been a better language than old school VB.

[CRConrad]

You still can, for free and all. Sure, Borland -- and the whole litany of company names that have owned Delphi, the product, since -- have on-and-off had "free" (=as in beer) editions, but that on-and-off inconsistency tends to sour my perspective on those. But, the venerable Free Pascal language and compiler gained (after a few fits and starts) a sister project, Lazarus[1], which is basically a clone of the Delphi class library and graphical IDE.

All FOSS all the way down. To quote jerryp, "Recommended."

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[1]: https://wiki.freepascal.org/Overview_of_Free_Pascal_and_Laza...