Watcom C/C++ is awesome too, but the set up is more involved as there is no (good) IDE included. It is limited in many respects too, but I really think it hits a sweet spot between the easy of use of BASIC, and the advanced features of C/C++. Easy to learn syntax, really great built in help system with examples, near instant compile times even on 286/386/486 machines, pointers, inline assembly, etc.

Allegro 3.x or 4.x is a really awesome 'batteries included' library for doing game development with, for example.Īs someone who was really big into QBasic back in the day, Turbo Pascal is really awesome to me. QBasic/QuickBASIC is what I self-taught myself programming with as a teenager in the 90's, so it's also something I will probably revisit for some new project in the future. I've also dabbled a bit with Delphi 1.0 as well as re-visited some of my childhood projects from back in the day written in QuickBASIC 4.5 and Visual Basic 6. Turbo Pascal 7 of course has it's own included IDE which is awesome, but for Watcom C projects, I use a heavily customized Aurora Text Editor installation.

Right now, I primarily have separate on-going projects in both Turbo Pascal 7 and Watcom C. For me this is 486 DX2 and Pentium MMX systems. I bounce around a bit with what I program in on my retro computers.

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