Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL
Funny article - he just forgot to mention C++
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/927/Real-Programmers-Don-t-Use-PASCAL
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/927/Real-Programmers-Don-t-Use-PASCAL
Funny how it was Pascal that put PCs and hobby programming on the map, giving us the world we now live in.
Sorry, I like Pascal, and people these days see that old article without the context to see just how biased an opinion statement it really was.
Sorry, I like Pascal, and people these days see that old article without the context to see just how biased an opinion statement it really was.
I like Pascal too.
When I started programming in the early nineties it was the official teaching language in German schools and universities.
Modern Pascal(FPC) has generics, operator overloading and all OO features like "modern" languages.
I guess many people don't know it when they write about Pascal.
When I started programming in the early nineties it was the official teaching language in German schools and universities.
Modern Pascal(FPC) has generics, operator overloading and all OO features like "modern" languages.
I guess many people don't know it when they write about Pascal.
Do you realize "Modern Pascal" didn't even exist and "OOP" wasn't yet a thing when that paper was written? In fact C was just a baby out of the Bell Labs and C++ would take another decade to even appear.
By the way I thought it was Basic that put PCs and hobby programming on the map, after all Basic was the really the start of Microsoft.
By the way I thought it was Basic that put PCs and hobby programming on the map, after all Basic was the really the start of Microsoft.
I think the original article was actually posted in 1983. C++ didn't exist ... but it does mention C:
Here's another take from xkcd
https://xkcd.com/378/
| If you ignore the fact that it's structured, even C programming can be appreciated by the Real Programmer: after all, there's no type checking, variable names are seven (ten? eight?) characters long, and the added bonus of the Pointer data type is thrown in. It's like having the best parts of FORTRAN and assembly language in one place. (Not to mention some of the more creative uses for #define.) |
Here's another take from xkcd
https://xkcd.com/378/
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I have to admit that my brain was confunded and my first response was actually about an early paper called Why PASCAL Is Not My Favorite Programming Language, by Kernighan. The link in OP is a joke piece that is fairly old. I never found it particularly funny, personally, but it sees its rounds with people year to year.
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Well, Borland did quite a number using Pascal. They created Delphi for RAD.
They had to gin up a sub-dialect so it understood all about Windows and the Windows GUI.
I never really used Delphi that much, but I did like using C++Builder years ago. C++B could use nearly all the hundreds of thousands of Delphi components with little to no modification.
They had to gin up a sub-dialect so it understood all about Windows and the Windows GUI.
I never really used Delphi that much, but I did like using C++Builder years ago. C++B could use nearly all the hundreds of thousands of Delphi components with little to no modification.
There were very few modifications to the language itself for specifically-Windows features — those that were were nothing but beneficial.
Object Pascal / Delphi is a very powerful language system that easily competes with C++ in terms of capability. (And, in many cases, surpassed it. It is only fairly recently that C++ has come into some of the easy power that OP possesses, and done so in a way that makes it work in a way that shines compared to OP.)
Borland/Embarcadero also, for the most part, made the right decisions about the language. But often enough where they went wrong Free Pascal got it right.
(I would still argue that operator overloading is incorrect: they should have followed Wuppertal's example.)
On top of that, it has an extensive and very capable library system that puts C/C++ to shame.
Unfortunately, Pascal isn't taken seriously by many people these days, so most of what we have is because of a dedicated group of hobbyists that don't necessarily have the same goals as, say, the C++ standards committee, and the Lazarus IDE feels a little hackish and is missing a little functionality.
On the other side of that is the Embarcadero RAD Studio. I don't like Embarcadero. They feel like used-car salesmen who have taken a great product and broken it down into so many subcategories with so many different sales options that you really kind of want to go running for your own sanity.
You can get Delphi Community Edition for free, but without RAD Studio Architect (which I can't hope to afford any day soon) it is kind of like getting Katniss Everdeen's explosive arrows but without the bow and only in the self-assembly versions.
I'm not going to guess on their marketing strategy, except that it probably involves legacy enterprise business solutions, LOL.
Object Pascal / Delphi is a very powerful language system that easily competes with C++ in terms of capability. (And, in many cases, surpassed it. It is only fairly recently that C++ has come into some of the easy power that OP possesses, and done so in a way that makes it work in a way that shines compared to OP.)
Borland/Embarcadero also, for the most part, made the right decisions about the language. But often enough where they went wrong Free Pascal got it right.
(I would still argue that operator overloading is incorrect: they should have followed Wuppertal's example.)
On top of that, it has an extensive and very capable library system that puts C/C++ to shame.
Unfortunately, Pascal isn't taken seriously by many people these days, so most of what we have is because of a dedicated group of hobbyists that don't necessarily have the same goals as, say, the C++ standards committee, and the Lazarus IDE feels a little hackish and is missing a little functionality.
On the other side of that is the Embarcadero RAD Studio. I don't like Embarcadero. They feel like used-car salesmen who have taken a great product and broken it down into so many subcategories with so many different sales options that you really kind of want to go running for your own sanity.
You can get Delphi Community Edition for free, but without RAD Studio Architect (which I can't hope to afford any day soon) it is kind of like getting Katniss Everdeen's explosive arrows but without the bow and only in the self-assembly versions.
I'm not going to guess on their marketing strategy, except that it probably involves legacy enterprise business solutions, LOL.
| Duthomhas wrote: |
|---|
| Funny how it was Pascal that put PCs and hobby programming on the map, giving us the world we now live in. |
This seems questionable: best as I recall the 1980s (when that article was from), we had the demo scene on one end of the hobbyist spectrum ("Real Programmers" who would laugh at Pascal) and the users of various BASIC variants on the other end. If not for the colleges convinced that Pascal was a good educational language, few people would've heard of it at all.
Um, no, Turbo Pascal put serious programming for the PC on the map. Likewise, the Apple Macintosh was actually designed with Pascal, in large part because of its dominance during the mid-to-late 80s.
Pascal was killed by a variety of things — not least because it was slow to adapt — but mostly because, like its rise, fortunes flow and ebb with the times and market forces that have nothing to do with any characteristic of Pascal itself.
I found a pretty good short read here: https://www.taoyue.com/tutorials/pascal/history.html
Pascal was killed by a variety of things — not least because it was slow to adapt — but mostly because, like its rise, fortunes flow and ebb with the times and market forces that have nothing to do with any characteristic of Pascal itself.
I found a pretty good short read here: https://www.taoyue.com/tutorials/pascal/history.html
Certainly not "serious programming', I can't think of any single piece of software I used on a PC that was written in Pascal. Perhaps my circles were different from yours, but for the programmers I interacted with on BBSes, Fidonet, and real life, Pascal (Turbo Pascal specifically) was an embarrassing joke only good for passing college classes.
Didn't know that MacOS had Pascal APIs, I wonder if it was part of its strategy to align with education.
Didn't know that MacOS had Pascal APIs, I wonder if it was part of its strategy to align with education.
Speaking about software, the "PC" was just an odd toy until "real" applications were developed. These applications included the Operating Systems of the day (CPM, DOS, Apple os, etc), these operating systems could run applications like VisiCalc, Lotus 123, Wordstar, Wordperfect, dBase, FoxPro, etc.
Most if not all of the above "applications" were developed in C, not pascal, not Fortran, not Basic, or any other language.
Most if not all of the above "applications" were developed in C, not pascal, not Fortran, not Basic, or any other language.
Nonsense. Just because there weren't prepackaged applications doesn't mean the hardware lacked practical purposes. People could always program the machines themselves. Some lines, such as the Commodore, even encouraged this by dropping the user directly into a REPL.
| People could always program the machines themselves. |
And that's what made them "odd toys".
| Some lines, such as the Commodore, |
Okay, and where is Commodore today? Tandy? Altair? Etc?
So by your interpretation, the Raspberry Pi is less of a toy than the Commodore PET, even though the former is aimed at developers and hobbyists and the latter was a consumer product?
"The company no longer exists, therefore its products were toys"?
Where's Compaq? Where's 3dfx? Where's Sun?
| Okay, and where is Commodore today? Tandy? Altair? Etc? |
Where's Compaq? Where's 3dfx? Where's Sun?
I don't know how you got along without ever seeing software written in TP in the 80s. Borland's text interface library (don't remember what it was called) is pretty distinctive so you can recognize quite a lot of software that was written using it. Though I do remember the C bigots who roundly abused any language they didn't like, Pascal being a common target.
Besides the number of games written using TP, you probably didn't have any reason to directly interact with a lot of TP software: a great deal of it was written for business applications. So, you could go home and hate on Pascal, drinking that cup of coffee that you bought from the convenience store using TP software for their POS systems or back-room accounting.
The MacOS was written in Apple Pascal which was designed in consultation with N. Wirth. Modern versions of the OS are rewrites.
Remember, no one software system ran the world in the 80s, and C became popular because of how AT&T introduced it to university computing systems (for free!).
Besides the number of games written using TP, you probably didn't have any reason to directly interact with a lot of TP software: a great deal of it was written for business applications. So, you could go home and hate on Pascal, drinking that cup of coffee that you bought from the convenience store using TP software for their POS systems or back-room accounting.
The MacOS was written in Apple Pascal which was designed in consultation with N. Wirth. Modern versions of the OS are rewrites.
Remember, no one software system ran the world in the 80s, and C became popular because of how AT&T introduced it to university computing systems (for free!).
| Remember, no one software system ran the world in the 80s |
| Duthomhas wrote: |
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| I don't know how you got along without ever seeing software written in TP in the 80s. |
ok, I'll try to remember what my PC would have back then (probably going for early 90s, I didn't get a hard drive until 92). PCTools, Norton Commander and Utilties, DESQView, ChiWriter, WordPerfect, FrontDoor, Maximus, GoldEd, Terminate, BlueWave, various commandline tools like pkarc/pkzip/arj, pu1700.
| Duthomhas wrote: |
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| the number of games written using TP, |
This I can do with more precision, I still have my BBS catalog. These games from before 1990 I have played on my PC: A10 Tank Killer (Dynamix, 1989) David Wolf Secret Agent (Dynamix, 1989), Hero's Quest 1 (Sierra, 1989), Life and Death (Software Toolworks, 1989), MechWarrior (Activision/Dynamix 1989), Space Quest 3 (Sierra, 1989), Their Finest Hour (LucasFilm, 1989), Tongue of the Fatman (Activision, 1989), The Dark Heart of Uukrul (Broderbund, 1989), Ultima 4 (Origin, 1985), Ultima 5 (Origin, 1988), Zak McKracken (LucasFilm, 1988). Just peeked at the oldest one, Ultima 4, originally an Apple game, and the PC port used the 1986 C library from Microsoft.
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