Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

This is the environment where my programming really took off from amateur to, well, less amateur.

It was so fast to compile and so ergonomic compared to the alternatives.

Great stuff.

Me too, with a lot of help from Herbert Schildt books.

The first software "product" that I sold was created using Turbo Pascal running on DOS. I was in high school at the time. It was designed for an Orthodontist who wanted to input (using a tablet with a cross-hair "mouse") about 20 points from an X-ray of a patient's head, then perform some calculations on the geometry to predict how the jaw bones and teeth were going to develop as the patient gets older.

To this day I think it's the most interesting and satisfying thing I've ever done in terms of software. Despite getting a Ph.D. in computer science and working for Amazon, Microsoft, and Cray, nothing even comes close, with the exception of one project at Microsoft Research. These days I've given up completely any hope of working on something even remotely interesting or satisfying.

Hmm, I started reading the Wikipedia article on the Pascal programming language. I was reading about the pointer types and saw a 'with' statement... Where did I see something like that before?... Yes, JavaScript! Where it is highly discouraged to use. How is it like in Pascal?

Me too! I graduated, in a manner of speaking, from FORTRAN, which had no recursion and pointers to Pascal.

Looking back I believe Pascal was the perfect language to learn those two fundamental and tricky concepts. It felt aesthetically pleasing and struck just the right balance between the terse (and sometimes quirky) C and verbose COBOL.

When I coded up those graph algorithms in Pascal I felt “happy” in a way that can’t be explained and which I didn’t experience in C.