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Delphi should be mentioned as well.
Its not actually dead either
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I've seen this several times. You need to get the stuff to the students who usually have no money to spare. Emphasis on "NO". Affordable doesn't cut it. If you can't download it from somewhere for free, something else will be used by students that will later determine what they'll use at their startups or companies. Even better if it's legal to download for free.
I'm not denying that the modern world of open source tooling and online documentation is better, but in the 1980s-early-1990s that's just not how it was. Things like Turbo Pascal and Smalltalk/V cost money, but not that much, and were worth it because of the large printed manuals they included, which were needed because you couldn't just Google things.
I say that it was an additional barrier to entry which got more significant the later we are in the 90s. That it was free was a significant boost for the popularity of Java (probably also the free JVM from Microsoft was a significant contributor).
In the early 80s you always had a programming language for free with your computer and often, those manuals were not bad either as that was seen as an additional selling point for the hardware and that's why the hardware producers did it.
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Very bad example. Video games community is very luddite in what concerns adoption of technologies, they usually only move forward when the platform owners force them to do so. Many moons ago, C, Pascal, Modula-2, Basic were seen as Unity is seen nowadays, naturally real game devs had to use Assembly, specially to take care of the special purpose graphic and sprite engines. Playstation 1 was probably the first console…
> Video games community is very luddite in what concerns adoption of technologies, they usually only move forward when the platform owners force them to do so. I think this is an unfair assessment. "Real devs" had to use assembly language because when targeting consoles and low-end home computers, this was the only really performant option for a long time. For a lot of types of games this doesn't matter so much, but…
While the demands of gaming industry have always driven the hardware evolution on mainstream computing, most studios only move to newer programing languages when the platform owners force them to do so.
The gaming industry is not known for being early adopters of new software stacks, and many studios would to this day actually use pure C instead of C++ if the console vendors would give them C based SDKs.
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Urban legend, as Borland fanboy, using their Pascal and C++ products, the generated binaries were pretty much the same, even if you might had to play with compiler pragmas, like disabling bounds checking for example. In MS-DOS days, if you actually cared about performance, a macro Assembler was the only way to achieve it.
Borland Pascal had built in assembly which was very easy to use and integrated with the rest of the language. This let me have DOS program that had it's own high performance graphics for GUI (I basically stole Motif visual design with some adaptations) and proprietary preemptive multithreading. C programs venturing into same realm were not really any faster and had to use assembly anyways for performance critical par…
To share a similar anecdote I was so proud of myself having created my own mouse support unit, that I then used to plug into a couple of BGI based applications.
The APL section seems a little off. I downloaded the latest Dyalog version and the RIDE IDE and it was all very simple to use. Despite having zero APL experience I wrote a pretty nifty program to simulate something in my domain in like 3 lines of code. The keyboard thing is a non-issue as the IDE let's you enter symbols and you quickly start to memorize that you can enter command-key r to enter rho and so forth. I've…
When I took programming in high school, we started with TI-BASIC on TI-83 calculators for about a month, as my programming teacher felt like this best replicated his experience learning programming on a TRS-80. I tend to agree, and this is a great use of BASIC. It's the default programming interface on a widely used computer to this day.
We then moved to VB6 for our "serious" programming, although we also did JavaScript and Java.
My first programming professionally was done in an office setting at a temp job using VBA to help with some Excel work. And then my first job as a software engineer, even though I wasn't writing it, did have some Visual Basic.NET floating around (most of my work was in C#).
Expecting to see Perl in an article like this in 5 to 10 years. Wasn't the first language I learned, but there's a fond place in my heart for it. At the time, it was the (only) less painful way to get at sockets, libc calls like getpwnam(), etc. I know the TIOBE index is flawed, but...ouch: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/perl/
> The interesting question isn’t “Why did Smalltalk die”, it’s “Why did C++ survive”. I think it’s because C++ had better C interop so was easier to extend into legacy systems. Video Games. From around 1999 to recently, C++ was the language of game development. It only recently came under serious threat, from C#.
Why did C++ survive the advent of Java? One reason: the mainstream JVM, HotSpot, is written in C++. As such, the production Java ecosystem is not self-hosting and relies on C++ to be sustained. (Writing a JVM in just Java is doable, and some research JVMs have done it, but that approach hasn’t yet been fully productionised.)