Origin :
Programming since teenage (1987), at a time when PCs under DOS needed some deep (meaning close to hardware) and very optimized coding to get the most of it. I used then Borland Pascal (v3 through v6) for high level programming (not Object Oriented) and ASM for high performance libraries (keyboard & mouse special drivers to get past DOS limitations, VGA display units for ultrafast graphic UI, network with IPX/SPX and a physic / 3D engine that could run with a 386 SX 20Mhz ....)
My top program of this era was made in 1995, being a networked space combat simulator allowing up to 10 players to have canon combat using joystick or keyboard, with a screen resolution up to 640x480x256 colors. Latest 486 DX-100 of my university network where then pushed to their maximum. It was not as beautiful as Wing Commander by far, but network games at this time where still a very very rare experience. Pascal code was above 25000 lines of code, with about as much of ASM x386 optimized code.
This kind of huge application written in procedural language clearly hit my limits, as it was nearly impossible to add new functionalities breaking the core design without getting lost in pages of functions that needed fixing.

Professionalism :
I then learned C++ and Object Oriented languages, and decided to port all my Pascal Code in C++, which took me a year. Then a terrible hard-drive crash occured, and most of it got lost. But at the same time I discovered the newly released Delphi 3, the perfect OO language derived from Pascal, and I decided that FATE was showing me the way.
Since then (~1998), I have tried every one of 2 versions (3,5,7,2007) and built extensive libraries for all kind of use, both for professional and personal needs.