I loved Turbo Pascal and Delphi, which is why I having Java and .NET compile into bytecode always felt a bit of deception.
What makes bytecode a deception though?
Why I use Object Pascal
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Re: Why I use Object Pascal
#42What caused pascal to lose out to C? Seems like it was a good language that had developer uptake.
UNIX and C.
Think of JavaScript and the browser.
Back in those days anything that wasn't the standard compilers sold by the OS vendor, meant spent a few extra thousands, so most people didn't.
On the PC world, Borland management trying to play with big boys, destroyed the indie culture around Turbo Pascal/Delphi and many moved into Java and .NET.
Re: Why I use Object Pascal
#43I've lately been trying out FreePascal for building my indie games (which have in the past been in C, Python, Java, Objective-C, and finally JavaScript), and it's going well enough. There's certainly room for improvement, and the Lazarus IDE is not at all to my taste, but it's likely to be my next-ten-years language. https://mdhughes.tech/2017/09/02/pascal/ and a couple of followup posts https://mdhughes.tech/categor…
If you don't rely on the presence of a form designer then you might want to use Visual Studio Code with the OmniPascal plugin (http://www.omnipascal.com) as a replacement for the Lazarus code editor.
Re: Why I use Object Pascal
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wasn't the latter part just as true for early C?
There certainly were/are differences across platforms in C (hence config scripts), but for the most part those aren't issues with the language itself but with the supplied libraries.
Oh the joys of writing portable code across Aix, HP-UX, Solaris using their own compilers, using a mix of K&R and ANSI C.
Many computers just had something like Small-C available.
Re: Why I use Object Pascal
#45"You can also define your own types" , "classes can also inherit other classes" , "Pascal is modular" ... Not to say these are not valid reasons, or expectations one may have from a language, but - what exactly is Pascal being compared to? I mean, it's 2017.
C has no classes, and everything's in one global namespace.
Scheme & LISP have no built-in classes, and one can argue that CLOS isn't what we normally describe as OOP. Both normally have a global namespace.
Inheritance in JavaScript is possible but very hard to implement correctly before ES6. Node has namespaces (sort of) but client-side JavaScript generally doesn't.
PHP in theory has namespaces, but the standard libraries are just dumped in global.
Re: Why I use Object Pascal
#46"You can also define your own types" , "classes can also inherit other classes" , "Pascal is modular" ... Not to say these are not valid reasons, or expectations one may have from a language, but - what exactly is Pascal being compared to? I mean, it's 2017.
neither javascript nor C++ are modular in 2017
...for some value of "modular".
Re: Why I use Object Pascal
#47I've lately been trying out FreePascal for building my indie games (which have in the past been in C, Python, Java, Objective-C, and finally JavaScript), and it's going well enough. There's certainly room for improvement, and the Lazarus IDE is not at all to my taste, but it's likely to be my next-ten-years language. https://mdhughes.tech/2017/09/02/pascal/ and a couple of followup posts https://mdhughes.tech/categor…
I was a lot younger and got it working on delphi7 but look at glscene[0]. It really changed how I view OOP and GL, amazing framework for its time...
Re: Why I use Object Pascal
#48Something I wonder how will one get object pascal work? The worst part is I would like to be picky and only to fpc/lazarus dev, no delphi. Otherwise I need to stick to selling my python/flask, html5 fizz buzz.
Re: Why I use Object Pascal
#49In my university (in Paris) we used to learn programming that way for the licence degree 1st year -> pascal only 2nd year -> c only 3d year -> java only That was a very nice learning curve for the core course of programming.
A friend taught me QBasic and then another friend taught me Turbo Pascal.
Later, in high school, I learned Delphi and we did Java at Monash University.
Re: Why I use Object Pascal
#50I loved Turbo Pascal and Delphi, which is why I having Java and .NET compile into bytecode always felt a bit of deception.
What makes bytecode a deception though?
If Java and .NET produced executables like C and C++, there would be less need for them.
Instead, one is forced to deliver the VM with the application or buy a third party AOT compiler like Excelsior JET, while depending on another language for implementation.
This made everyone that cared about writing native executables focus on C and C++, with the respective increase in unsafe code.
This is finally changing thanks to D, Go, Swift, Rust, but slowly.
So we have .NET Native on UWP, Xamarin on iOS and Android and IL2CPP on Unity.
Java now started a long road that will take several years until Project Metropolis will finally deliver some kind of results.