Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?

Although an interesting reading from Kernighan in the temporal and industry context (let us remember he worked for years building UNIX, the greatest reason C still survives, and published the reference C book), it is also interesting to see that at least six of his arguments against Pascal (namely, 1, 2*, 5, 6, 8*, 9, where only part of the arguments 2 and 8 should be considered) are actually considered best practices nowadays, and are related to type safety and functional programming.

I am not a Pascal expert, but I believe that arguments 3, 4, 7 and 8 are not valid any more, possibly they were not even valid a decade later, which would invalidate the whole essay.

And some of the "advantages" of C over Pascal, presented by Kernighan, are exactly the origin of many CVEs we have nowadays, such as unbounded arrays and unverified casting of types.

I really like Kernighan's code and texts, but it is important to remember he is really biased in this text, and hasn't provided any of the advantages of Pascal over C, except it is easier to learn.

I won't promote Pascal, but one can see that a language two years older than C has some language constructs [1] not seen even on modern programming languages! Kernighan, though, purposely left it all out of his evaluation.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(programming_language...

Pascal represented a worse compromise between to-the-metal programming and structured programming concepts than C did.

Now, arguably, you would say that some of the abstractions offered were reasonable tradeoffs, but at the time, things like the nature of strings and the second class support for pointers and the difficulty of (and awkward syntax for) memory management meant that it was fundamentally limited in applicability.

No standard library

As someone who started their computer science studies with Pascal and then switched to C (I use C for comparison because it was the dominant programming language in 1990s computer science programs) , I can say that C just offered more to the aspiring software developer. For most people who coded in the 90s Pascal meant Turbo Pascal. While the language itself was great, MS-DOS where it ran not so much.

Especially when you compared MS-DOS to Unix (I say Unix because this was before Linux was dominant) systems which most computer science students were being introduced to at the time. With C you got access to all the Unix dev tools and you could do Unix systems programming. I think too a lot of young computer science students go through a phase of all things difficult are good and C on Unix made for a great learning opportunity.

Speaking as myself, the problem was the ecosystem not the language per say. I think for most of us it isn't even a contest between MS-DOS or Unix.

You have to be careful by what you define as "success" and "failure". Many/most languages never really fail, they just become more and more niche.

So taking your question to be, why isn't Pascal used as much as some of the other languages from antiquity, like C, sh/bash/ksh/etc, or even Lisp, my opinion is that it was a combination of it being an "old" language and an interpreted language.

If you take a look at a timeline of programming language creation and usage [0], you see only a few compiled languages from before the 1980s survived and pretty much no interpreted languages did. The interpreted languages that did survive were mostly created in the late 1980s or early 1990s (Perl, Ruby, Python, Javascript).

I kind of take this to mean that the programmer productivity gained from interpreted languages was overshadowed by the computational speedup from their compiled counterparts during the pre 1980s time. When computer's computational speed finally caught up so that interpreted languages made more sense, Pascal was now 20+ years old and was overshadowed by the newer interpreted languages that took advantage of newer ideas in programming language design and/or were more feature rich in the programming language fads of those eras.

"sh" holds a kind of special place, as it's the workhorse of interacting with Unix-like environments, so it became pretty well entrenched. If you look at a lot of the more "modern" interpreted languages, you can see a lot of them were meant to supplant or complement tools specific to the command line or the command line itself (e.g. AWK -> Perl).

I don't claim to have any deep knowledge so all this is my very biased and weak opinion.

[0] https://ccrma.stanford.edu/courses/250a-fall-2005/docs/Compu...