The Pascal pro­gram­ming lan­guage is the mother of struc­tured pro­gram­ming. The lan­guage is elegant, easy to read, and uses clear defi­ni­tions. Pascal is designed like few others to support the develop­ment of well-struc­tured, robust, and error-free pro­grams, making it an excel­lent choice for complex appli­ca­tions.

The FreePascal compiler is a versatile tool in the desktop realm. There's hardly a niche it doesn't cover. The visual develop­ment envi­ron­ments Delphi and Lazarus truly live up to the term "Rapid Appli­ca­tion Develop­ment" – with just a few clicks, you can create a working appli­ca­tion.

Looking back: When high-level pro­gram­ming lan­guages were conceived in the 1960s, there were two main approach­es: Either program as close to the machine as possible, which suited operat­ing system compo­nents and device drivers, or adopt a processor-indepen­dent perspec­tive that emphasized clearly defined struc­tures.

To that end, Swiss computer scientist ↗Niklaus Wirth (b.1934 †2024) designed the lan­guage Pascal (1972), whose style is modeled on English grammar, making it easy to read.
Pascal introduced strong typing of variables, which makes code easier to verify and main­tain and increas­es reli­abili­ty. That's why Pascal was often used in safety-critical fields such as trans­porta­tion technol­ogy, energy supply, medical engi­neer­ing, the mili­tary, and aero­space.

However, the ↗strong typing didn't have only fans. I suspect that program­mers at the time, who were used to low-level pro­gram­ming, probably saw the new type system as a constraint and preferred the weakly typed C pro­gram­ming lan­guage. As a result, profes­sional program­mers tended to choose C, while Pascal was more common­ly found in schools and univer­si­ties as a teach­ing lan­guage.
Pascal never truly gained a foothold in commercial pro­gram­ming. A shame, in my opinion, be­cause Pascal would have been an excel­lent choice for appli­ca­tion develop­ment.

The evolution of C and Pascal followed a similar path: C became C++, and Pascal evolved into Object Pascal (e.g., Turbo Pascal with object orien­ta­tion start­ing in 1989).
After Microsoft released "Visual C++" in 1993, Borland intro­duced "Delphi" in 1995 as a visual pro­gram­ming envi­ron­ment based on Turbo Pascal.

Although Delphi is a powerful tool, it couldn’t compete with Micro­soft's market dominance. That’s unfortu­nate, I think, because personally, I find the "Delphi lan­guage" to be the more elegant pro­gram­ming lan­guage. While some of C++'s weak­nesses had to be addressed with new concepts like those in the C# lan­guage, this wasn’t neces­sary with Delphi.

By 2012, the open-source FreePascal and Lazarus projects had already seen 10 years of develop­ment when Lazarus reached version 1.0. And new versions continue to be re­leased every year — for example, the current version 4.0 from 2025.
If you haven’t tried Lazarus yet, you defi­nite­ly should. Since Free­Pascal is largely Delphi-compatible, you’ll find plenty of tutorials and support in numerous online forums for Delphi and Free­Pascal.