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Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?

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Re: Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?

#71

Post by Koshkin »

einr wrote: post #34
abetusk wrote: post #30

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 tim…

Pascal is generally not an interpreted language. It is a compiled language that is suitable for systems and applications programming.

As far as I remember, Pascal admitted single-pass analysis. Such languages are especially amenable to being interpreted, i.e. immediately translated into executable actions (vs. some sort of bytecode).

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?

#72

Post by mrbonner »

I learned programming in my teenage age with Pascal. Sometimes I wonder about this too: typed, compiled, no garbage col, pointer arithmetic. With TUrbo Pascal I have the entire IDE and a compiler in single floppy.

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?

#73

Post by fayten »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #18
fayten wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contents of that post have not been relevant for decades. I would recommend giving Free Pascal a whirl if you haven't. FPC can even compile to JavaScript and it works with WebGL https://github.com/genericptr/Pas2JS-WebGL#pas2js-webgl

> The contents of that post have not been relevant for decades. But decades ago is precisely the timeframe we're talking about here. Pascal lost to C for the reasons Kernighan mentions (among others), which is the question the OP was asking.

I'm not sure Pascal entirely lost due to just C. Borland's Turbo Pascal was quite popular and was broadly used in the mid 80s. Apple even used their own Object Pascal variant through-out the 80s. Pascal was primarily used for application development and for this case it was leagues ahead of C and C++. Turbo Pascal thrived up until Delphi was released in 1995, which then became the new lead Pascal. Unfortunately, Delphi would come to face it's killer within a year.

When Java came out in 1996 it became an overnight juggernaut in application development. Java had a ton of hype when it was still in beta in 1995 and TIME magazine even listed it as one of the best products of the year--when it wasn't even released yet.

Microsoft poached Anders Hejlsberg, the primary language designer of Turbo Pascal and Delphi, from Borland in 1996 to have him work J++ their variant of Java. J++ followed the Sun Java spec with a few deviations, but it was just another testament to how quickly Java was taking over.

Borland was now competing with something that was free and they needed to pivot and well...they didn't.

Random articles for further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B

http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,9839...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8460037/list-of-delphi-l...

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?

#74

Post by kortex »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #65

Pascal had problems that kept users from doing anything useful with it. Real-world implementations included bypasses for the problems, but then they weren't really implementing Pascal any more. Kernighan's famous article "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language" explains more: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pasc...

Wow, that is incredibly damning. Is it actually true that arrays of different lengths are different types, and there is no way to write generic array methods? And there's no way to cast byte arrays into structures? I almost can't believe it - a language without both features, and without any kind of escape hatche to me feels forever bound to be a toy language. But that would absolutely answer OP's question - it never took off cause IO is completely hamstrung. Programs need IO, and lots of it, with lots of flexibility, to do anything interesting.

Edit: I said I was a bit incredulous of the claims. If true, those would be bad features.

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?

#75

Post by mikewarot »

Koshkin wrote: post #71
einr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pascal is generally not an interpreted language. It is a compiled language that is suitable for systems and applications programming.

As far as I remember, Pascal admitted single-pass analysis. Such languages are especially amenable to being interpreted, i.e. immediately translated into executable actions (vs. some sort of bytecode).

I'm not familiar with "single-pass analysis", but I do know that Pascal can be compiled with a single pass recursive descent compiler, which made Turbo Pascal orders of magnitude faster than any other compiler at the time. In an era when C programmers could have coffee while waiting for things to compile, a pascal program hit enter, saw the results, and moved on.

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?

#76

Post by citrin_ru »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #65

Pascal had problems that kept users from doing anything useful with it. Real-world implementations included bypasses for the problems, but then they weren't really implementing Pascal any more. Kernighan's famous article "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language" explains more: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pasc...

It hardly a factor IMHO. All non-dead languages add new features over time and there is nothing wrong with this if features well designed. Turbo Pascal allowed to implement anything one can implement in C. Pascal is not so concise as C but more readable to me (and I read a lot of C, so it is not because I don’t know C).

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?

#77

Post by clouddrover »

Normille wrote: post #7
clouddrover wrote: post #2

Fashion as much as anything. A lot of people have the idea that Pascal is somehow not "modern", but these same people almost universally haven't used it lately or even at all. Mostly companies just want to use what everyone else is using to ensure there's broad support and to make individual programmers easier to hire and fire. But there's nothing stopping you from using it now if you want to. Personally, I quite lik…

I think your first link [freepascal.org] speaks volumes. I clicked on it and was taken to a page which looked like it was stuck in a 1990s timewarp. Opened it on my phone and, as expected, no concessions to mobile layout at all. Just that massive page of text rendered in microscopic size on my phone screen. Back to the site on my laptop and I look for the two things I want to see up front when deciding whether I'm in…

The utter superficiality of your comment is the perfect demonstration of the fashion driven nature of software development. You're not worried about the language. You're worried about the marketing and whether or not you feel cool.

You might as we be asking if this is the right language to wear this season or if your bum looks big in this compiler.

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?

#78

Post by kortex »

Stratoscope wrote: post #42
abetusk wrote: post #30

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 tim…

Now wait a minute. If you say that JavaScript is an interpreted language, you would also have to call Java an interpreted language. Do you agree with that? They both work in exactly the same way. Your source code is compiled to bytecode. That bytecode is then interpreted by a virtual machine. [1] That interpreter may then start a Just In Time compiler (JIT) to compile some of the bytecode down to machine code. Other…

GP's point is about languages through history. Compiled-to-machine-code V8 JS came out in 2008.

It's not just about compile-to-byte-code. It's about the "scriptyness" of that bytecode as well. Python bytecode operates at a much higher level of abstraction than machine code or even JVM.

Also we tend to classify languages with more dynamic type systems as "interpreted". It's a nebulous boundary. Not black-and-white whatsoever.

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?

#79

Post by mikewarot »

The leading implementation was by Borland, which addressed most of the limitations of the language, and provided a solid compiler and IDE in Turbo Pascal, then Delphi.

Borland started raising the prices of their compilers to the point that the hobbyist could no longer justify it, and market share fell accordingly.

Since Turbo Pascal/Delphi was the only Pascal with a complete library, the fortunes of the language went with it.

There is a fairly reasonable open source Pascal these days, the Free Pascal project, on top of which is built a GUI IDE, Lazarus. They try to maintain feature parity with Delphi, which is now far, far too expensive, they do a fairly good job with it.

It is possible to crank out a Windows GUI program in Lazarus pretty darned quickly. It's my preferred programming environment to this day.

Re: Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?

#80

Post by Gys »

mikewarot wrote: post #79

The leading implementation was by Borland, which addressed most of the limitations of the language, and provided a solid compiler and IDE in Turbo Pascal, then Delphi. Borland started raising the prices of their compilers to the point that the hobbyist could no longer justify it, and market share fell accordingly. Since Turbo Pascal/Delphi was the only Pascal with a complete library, the fortunes of the language went…

Borland also dabbled for a while with a Mac version and later with a Linux version. Both were never succesful but I expect they put a lot of resources in there.

Edit: it is funny that Lazarus is cross platform, while Delphi still only runs on Windows (although it can compile to other platforms).

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