Pascal at Apple

Post by bitwize » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 1:15 AM UTC

hyperpape wrote: post #7

bdcravens wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know 10 years ago turning off Javascript was still a real concern. I tend to be of the mindset that in 2017 a browser without Javascript is like a browser without a mouse/trackpad - technically viable, but no one does it, so depending on Javascript is a given. Know of any good statistics on this however?

1.1% of people have it turned off in one measurement: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missi... .

Post by joezydeco » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 1:18 AM UTC

cjensen wrote: post #2

I really miss Pascal; it was a great and safe language for beginners. As it was extended with Objects and Modules, it was great for development. But there are good reasons it was surpassed by C. In early Pascal, you got a pointer by allocating memory; you could not get a pointer to an existing variable. You'd be surprised how often that gets in the way when implementing a data structure. Just try to implement the fol…

Post by Swizec » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 1:32 AM UTC

nxc18 wrote: post #6

Swizec wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I drive my car without an engine, it only goes downhill. I almost stopped using cars because I thought there was nothing interesting there. It's 2017. Turn on your JavaScript.

It doesn't matter what year it is, JavaScript provides zero utility on a blog except to give the author analytics. Why do people hate the idea of documents so much? Imagine if you had to suffer through a different app for every single book you read; that is what a js-mandatory page is.

Post by thought_alarm » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 1:35 AM UTC

    ...

    My manager at the time said, no, we don't want to do this [Pascal],
    people are happy with what they got.  I overrode him and went to
    Jobs, and Jobs said "Well, I'm not convinced. I think our users are
    happy with BASIC and assembly language.  But you seem passionate
    about it.  I'll give you one week to prove me otherwise."  
    
    I was on an airplane within two hours down to UC San Diego and I
    started porting right away.

    ...
    
    The other thing that happened then is I had to plug in the disk
    routines, and their system was pretty big and that little 13-sector
    floppy disk didn't have a lot of capacity.  Well, Woz had just come up
    with a different way of encoding the data on the disk so that we could
    get more data for the same disk size, and we needed the 16-sector disk
    routines.  And so Woz came down, and I was there... I had never bothered
    to get a motel because I slept on the bench when I wasn't working.  This
    is in the computer science lab at UC San Diego.  I was busy, I didn't
    have time to go sleep. 

    But Woz came down, and I got to interact with him and it was really fun
    because he was working on installing these 16-sector disk driver
    routines, and he'd go 'type type type type type' -- and he didn't type
    in assembly language and have it assembled.  No, he'd type in 6502
    machine code.  Hex. -- He'd type in hex, and then, you know, watching
    him type and he'd go 'type type type' -- pause -- 'type type type type',
    and when he finished I asked him what was the pause?  And he said
    "forward branch, seven instructions, I had to compute the offset before
    I continued".  So, he didn't back-patch the offset, he actually looked
    at what he was going to be typing, knew how many bytes it would take...
    he was brilliant.

Post by boznz » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 1:50 AM UTC

cjensen wrote: post #2

I really miss Pascal; it was a great and safe language for beginners. As it was extended with Objects and Modules, it was great for development. But there are good reasons it was surpassed by C. In early Pascal, you got a pointer by allocating memory; you could not get a pointer to an existing variable. You'd be surprised how often that gets in the way when implementing a data structure. Just try to implement the fol…