131–140 of 271 posts
I really don't know why languages like C, Java or JavaScript started to allow variable definitions everywhere. Needing to declare variables first leads to much cleaner functions.
Byte Magazine, Philippe Kahn, Chaos Manor..
Niklaus Wirth has done an immense work. From Euler to Oberon, passing by Modula, he is a great visionary and a decades determinant mind.
Wow I wrote a lot of Pascal when I was a kid. I then did a bit of C but didn't like it much, and moved onto Delphi. It hadn't occurred to me that Pascal is actually younger than me, though not by much.
Pascal? Limited interest among system/OS kernel programmer nowadays. Still a fine language for building applications, though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Woah. Had no idea he was responsible for Turbo Pascal
And Delphi, where at least he tried to do something with strings hah. Never got used to them, and never really liked Wirth languages, but respect is due of course.
My first exposure to TP was when I pirated it off a warez BBS in the winter of 93 at the age of 14. The raw power I felt when I compiled my own EXE in contrast to running just a .BAS file was enthralling! I started modding Renegade BBS and writing door programs. I tried to, unsuccessfully, create worms, Trojans and viruses. It changed my life and set me on a course for where I am in tech today. Moreover I’m reformed…
A few years later at 16, I actually got paid for developing a small app for managing my dad's customers, paid by the company he worked for. Part of that money went into getting a legal version of TP6.
Good times :)
It's hard to overstate just how much faster Turbo Pascal was than its competitors. So fast that it was hard to believe it wasn't cheating in some way. And then the resulting program was faster too. A tour-de-force of its day, and it deserved all the acclimation that it got.
The main thing I recall about TP was that it came with simple, easy to understand code examples for every function that were organized logically and easy to find and use. So as a teenager who barely understood basic I could teach myself TP without the internet, just using the IDE. So many modern systems do not have anything even close to this. I wonder if its inherent in the nature of the simpler x86 DOS based system…
Processing (P5) had this: you can select any string of text in its IDE anl search for it in the docs, and if it's one of the built-in functions or constants it will open the associated static html page that came installed with the software, so no internet nor server required. And despite being offline you can still navigate the docs too. This feels a lost basic skill in static site generation these days. It was the o…
Turbo Pascal was the first "real" programming language I learned past 6809E ASM, structured basic flavors and batch/shell back in the very late 80s. When I went to college for CS in the early 90s, they were still teaching the first year of classes in Borland Pascal so that turned out to be very useful experience. A few years later, my Pascal background sailed me into a half-decade stint as a custom app dev working wi…