When working on demo effects, I found it extremely important to have lightning fast edit-compile-run cycles. Before interactive demo editing tools became a thing, we had to modify code and recompile it to see anything. With Turbo Pascal (or TASM for that matter) you'd have results in under a second. Every now and then your demo would crash, but having set up AUTOEXEC.BAT to start Turbo Pascal, you'd be back in your editor in a few seconds.

I just don't understand how people can put up with waiting for compilers, Docker image downloads, and "continuous integration" builds that take upwards of whole minutes. Granted, it takes some effort to get things fast, but it is perfectly possible on modern hardware to have lightning fast compilation, and runtime replacement of modules. For some reason most people just don't care, and it sometimes makes one feel terribly lonely.

Also, inline assembly was really nice!

  asm
    mov ax, 13h
    int 10h
  end;