I learned object pascal (Delphi) in school in high school (now 18 years ago) and it was love at first sight. Coming from ansi c and ansi c ++, the lack of the garbage collector has never been a problem. But then the license costs stopped me as well as the fact that I am a supporter of the open source world. A few years later I discovered lazarus and the free pascal and I must say that since then I have never abandoned them (now 12 years in which I program for linux / windows and for a few years also for mac os and raspberry all for free). If the delphi had lowered the licensing costs and made the product open source in its time it would have killed the market, but it was not so.