I hope this isn't hosted on Pascal. Got a 502.
Probably got a 502 for it not being hosted on Pascal.
But iirc, HN is Lisp?
Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)
11–20 of 160 posts
Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)
#12Hmm meh. I have a soft spot for Delphi/Object Pascal but I think the case here is not great. What it looks like at a glance is they wrote a better Pascal program than the Go one it was competing against, rather than just idiomatically port it. A fine approach, but it doesn't tell us that much. Specifically, it doesn't tell us very much about programming languages. Go has plenty of weaknesses versus Pascal, but two co…
Delphi was really a "Concorde moment" in that it was actually rapid, both in terms of development speed, and performance, which was somehow forgotten as the web emerged.
Forgotten to the point that people thought Visual Basic was a good idea.
Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)
#13PS4 emulator/compat layer in FP: https://github.com/red-prig/fpPS4
Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)
#14Hmm meh. I have a soft spot for Delphi/Object Pascal but I think the case here is not great. What it looks like at a glance is they wrote a better Pascal program than the Go one it was competing against, rather than just idiomatically port it. A fine approach, but it doesn't tell us that much. Specifically, it doesn't tell us very much about programming languages. Go has plenty of weaknesses versus Pascal, but two co…
Delphi was really a "Concorde moment" in that it was actually rapid , both in terms of development speed, and performance, which was somehow forgotten as the web emerged. Forgotten to the point that people thought Visual Basic was a good idea.
Delphi was great but a major deal breaker was that is was not free to use.
Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)
#15Hmm meh. I have a soft spot for Delphi/Object Pascal but I think the case here is not great. What it looks like at a glance is they wrote a better Pascal program than the Go one it was competing against, rather than just idiomatically port it. A fine approach, but it doesn't tell us that much. Specifically, it doesn't tell us very much about programming languages. Go has plenty of weaknesses versus Pascal, but two co…
Delphi (and probably also Free Pascal?) is not wholly memory safe, but at least it has bounds checking for arrays and a sane string type, which is more than you get with C...
I'm an ex-Delphi developer myself, and actually Go and Pascal are more closely related than you might think at first glance: Go code looks mostly like a C-family language, but the declaration syntax ("a int" instead of "int a") and the "package" concept which helps achieve fast compilation times are borrowed from Pascal. And both have a ":=" operator, although in Go it declares and assigns variable(s) with type inference, while in Pascal it's any assignment.
Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)
#16Nice mormot.
Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)
#17pascal was the 2nd language i learned after basic and it was the best time of my learning life. the fact that you could add inline assembler code and the early attempts of object oriented programming were amazing. it was turbo pascal 6.0 btw.
Inline assembler was a killer feature: you could optimize bits of your code without having to understand how an assembler works and without having to deal with a linker as Pascal compiler did everything itself.
Great time indeed !
Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting take. Pascal is definitely a niche language but most of the community around FPC and Lazarus seems very positive and welcoming. Would you mind expanding on why you feel this way? What Pascal do you use? Do you use Delphi or FPC/Lazarus? What don’t you like about the language (or your particular vendor implementation)?
I have to say I wrote this as more of a joke as I do have no actual experience with Pascal. Looking at the syntax I just assumed it to be extremely similar to the language I have to work with on a daily basis. And with that, just as limited. C/AL is a product of Microsoft and is only used in their ERP Software Navision. It's a horrible experience to work with as you don't have a lot of modern languages features just…
Free Pascal is a lot more robust and featureful than whatever God-awful ERP language you have to work in. It's a spiritual descendant of Turbo Pascal and Delphi, which were used to develop diverse applications from line-of-business to games for decades. Dynamic memory allocation and objects are built-in. It is definitely NOT the Pascal of Kernighan's "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language".
Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)
#19>> And... Pascal is still in the race for sure!
And what about.. umm... Modula 2/3 or Oberon? They don't gain as much industry attractions as Pascal does, eh?
Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)
#20I def have a soft spot for Pascal. And I think Niklaus Wirth deserves more recognition in broader circles for his foundational work with pcode, compilers, Oberon, etc. I learned Pascal like many of us growing up in the early PC era and never could look at BASIC the same way again (or respect Gates for his love of it, lol). I think having such a highly structured language at a young age did wonders.
But these days folks are mostly used to the C style syntax. And I'm not even arguing that it is a better language than C or others. But the whole industry has gone overall into believing that anything newly 'invented' is good and anything that's been around a while is passé. Ironically, at the same time as the core technologies we use are based on decades old tech like Unix, relational databases, TCP/IP, etc. And many others like Lisp and Smalltalk fell by the wayside at least partly due to performance issues that were made irrelevant by Moore's law long ago.
Oh humans... :)
Btw, Logo is another one that's under appreciated. Seymour Papert was brilliant in making programming more visual and intuitive for kids. And I didn't actually know until recently it's actually a Lisp based language with a lot of power. Who knew?
In some parallel universe, I'd love to see folks like those, along with many others from that era, as the ones we heap recognition on instead of our worship of current tech billionaires. Those guys generally understood the hardware, software, and core theory. Given the mess that is computing and the internet, it's a shame that we'll be losing them over the next few decades.