Your sympathy relieves my pain. I, too, finally had a breakthrough and now can use google federation with non-GCP apis like admin sdk.

Second programming language for me, after Applesoft BASIC on an Apple ][

I even used Apple Pascal, with 2 5.25" floppy disk drives, often physically swapping disks with the compiler/linker/etc. during a single compile run.

And I don't mean to be disrespectful of Dr. Wirth by any means, but for some reason my mind popped up this question: "Did he pass by value, or by reference?"

depends on if he was in Europe or America

I never used any of his creations, but I did read through his 'Plea for Lean Software' in a formative time of my educational/SE journey (at the recommendation of Joe Armstrong IIRC)

https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf

Turbo Pascal was my preferred living environment as a kid...

Pascal was the first "real" programming language I learned as a child. Sad news. His work affected me an it sounds like many other lives

I learned QBasic and tried to do some C and x86 assembly independently as a kid, but learning Turbo Pascal in high school and being able to quickly put together a CLI or TUI for any idea I thought of was the first I really felt 'powerful' with a computer. Writing (and internally sharing) unapproved support tools in Delphi at my first helpdesk job luckily led me to more senior technical opportunities at the company instead of getting fired 🙂.

May we all live to 89 after a life of worthy accomplishments