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Why I use Object Pascal

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Re: Why I use Object Pascal

#171

Post by gardnr »

whatyoucantsay wrote: post #165
jandrese wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are off by about a decade. FreeBSD 2.0 was released in the mid 90s. I still skim Slashdot too. Most of the time I'm working on ancient versions of RHEL that are never connected to the internet so I don't exactly get to use "stacks" or anything that wants to pull code from Github. If it doesn't come on the RHEL 5.5 disk it's not available. You might be surprised how much you can do with a modest CGI script, a touc…

I clearly misjudged the time of Pascal's popularity and have never heard of RHEL but thanks for the response! What is Slashdot's strength from your POV?

Slashdot is kind of like Mel Gibson. It was cool when it first came out and now it's still around.

Re: Why I use Object Pascal

#172

Post by khedoros1 »

whatyoucantsay wrote: post #165
jandrese wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are off by about a decade. FreeBSD 2.0 was released in the mid 90s. I still skim Slashdot too. Most of the time I'm working on ancient versions of RHEL that are never connected to the internet so I don't exactly get to use "stacks" or anything that wants to pull code from Github. If it doesn't come on the RHEL 5.5 disk it's not available. You might be surprised how much you can do with a modest CGI script, a touc…

I clearly misjudged the time of Pascal's popularity and have never heard of RHEL but thanks for the response! What is Slashdot's strength from your POV?

> have never heard of RHEL

But surely you've heard of Red Hat itself? In the early 2000s, Red Hat Linux broke into a couple directions: "Fedora Linux" as the community version of the OS, and "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" as the supported, enterprise-level version of the OS (and CentOS as the community-supported version of RHEL).

Re: Why I use Object Pascal

#173

Post by CiPHPerCoder »

mdhughes wrote: post #69
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PHP in theory has namespaces, but the standard libraries are just dumped in global. Modern PHP development almost exclusively uses Composer libraries rather than the standard libraries, which overwhelmingly use namespaces in Vendor\Project format. There's going to be a push to clean up the standard library in the coming years. The plan is to introduce a namespaced alternative to the standard library in the global n…

Namespaces by 2020? That'd be nice. The \ syntax still makes my eyes bleed a bit, when most others use . or :

You might want to go see a doctor and get that checked out then.

Just because "most others use . or :" doesn't mean it's the only correct syntax in the realm of possibility.

Re: Why I use Object Pascal

#174

Post by Idontknowmyuser »

emodendroket wrote: post #166
krylon wrote: post #25

I feel kind of sheepish to admit that "Why Pascal is not my favorite programming language" had a huge impact on me and caused me to avoid Pascal until I was forced to deal with it because a coworker quit and dropped maintenance of an in-house application in my lap. I was happy to realize that most of the criticism in that essay no longer applies to relatively recent versions of the language/IDE (Delphi 7 in my case).…

Despite that article being a venerated classic I felt kind of put off when I first read it because the part about arrays and strings having sizes seems... well, I guess it's aged poorly.

In the old versions of Pascal a function/porcedure only accepted an array of a fixed size (in fact you had to declare a type specifically for that size). for example if you had an array of 10 and an array of 100 you needed to write two functions to deal with it.

I was taught turbo Pascal in highschool and it was so bad that even C felt less annoying.

Re: Why I use Object Pascal

#175

Post by _pdp_ »

slig wrote: post #127
_pdp_ wrote: post #116

My dad still runs his business on a software I wrote in 1998 in Delphi. I haven't touched it since then but it is the only code I have that still works 19 years later.

Does it runs on modern Windows or is it running on a VM?

Window 7/8 at the moment I think.

Re: Why I use Object Pascal

#176

Post by cjsuk »

jandrese wrote: post #145
whatyoucantsay wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be 50... and you're still on HN! Are you still an engineer? If so, what stack are you using now?

You are off by about a decade. FreeBSD 2.0 was released in the mid 90s. I still skim Slashdot too. Most of the time I'm working on ancient versions of RHEL that are never connected to the internet so I don't exactly get to use "stacks" or anything that wants to pull code from Github. If it doesn't come on the RHEL 5.5 disk it's not available. You might be surprised how much you can do with a modest CGI script, a touc…

I miss the days when you had to live off the manpages and vendor packages. As a former Solaris admin in a defence sector company, we were 100% airgapped. Mobile phones were handed in as you walked into the security office. None of that github internet stuff, no googling a problem.

The place had literally piles of OReilly books and that was it. Those were gold.

When I got home I ran NetBSD on salvaged sun4c and sun4m kit.

Re: Why I use Object Pascal

#177

Post by virgulino »

whatyoucantsay wrote: post #139
jandrese wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My High School programming class was taught in Pascal (Turbo Pascal version 3 IIRC). I remember liking it just fine, but when I went to the university I switched to C because everything interesting was written in C. Also, there were no Pascal compilers in the FreeBSD (2.0) ports tree back then. I had a notion that Pascal was a "toy teaching language" too, but for what I was doing that didn't really matter.

You must be 50... and you're still on HN! Are you still an engineer? If so, what stack are you using now?

Coming from Microsoft's MSX-Basic, Turbo Pascal 3 was my first "grown up's language", also on 8-bit MSX computer. And I'm not 50 yet...

Re: Why I use Object Pascal

#178

Post by markb139 »

whatyoucantsay wrote: post #139
jandrese wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My High School programming class was taught in Pascal (Turbo Pascal version 3 IIRC). I remember liking it just fine, but when I went to the university I switched to C because everything interesting was written in C. Also, there were no Pascal compilers in the FreeBSD (2.0) ports tree back then. I had a notion that Pascal was a "toy teaching language" too, but for what I was doing that didn't really matter.

You must be 50... and you're still on HN! Are you still an engineer? If so, what stack are you using now?

52 here. Did some Pascal at university on a VAX.

Currently working in python in fintech environment.

Re: Why I use Object Pascal

#179

Post by pjmlp »

whatyoucantsay wrote: post #139
jandrese wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My High School programming class was taught in Pascal (Turbo Pascal version 3 IIRC). I remember liking it just fine, but when I went to the university I switched to C because everything interesting was written in C. Also, there were no Pascal compilers in the FreeBSD (2.0) ports tree back then. I had a notion that Pascal was a "toy teaching language" too, but for what I was doing that didn't really matter.

You must be 50... and you're still on HN! Are you still an engineer? If so, what stack are you using now?

Above 40+, mostly Java and .NET languages, with some ocasional C++ thrown in when low level stuff is called for.

JavaScript when doing web development, TrasactSQL, PL/SQL and pgSQL for database manipulation.

Plus lots of other languages and tech, keeping an eye on what might be interesting to focus or advocate to customers.

Re: Why I use Object Pascal

#180

Post by klipt »

pjmlp wrote: post #133
jandrese wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like Pascal's memory management and pointer situation was that much better.

They actually are, because Pascal knows the size of its types, while C requires using a mix of sizeof and malloc, which many people still get wrong, specially with arrays.

Of course in C++ you can just use a vector. Object Pascal is certainly closer to C++ than C.

The main advantage of Pascal is super fast compilation, but C++ modules should close that gap once they make it into the standard.

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