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Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL (1982)

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Re: Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL (1982)

#21
post #5

One of the programs closest to my heart which I use multiple times a day, "Beyond Compare" is written in PASCAL, Delphi more specifically. I know very little about PASCAL, but I know that Beyond Compare is rock solid.

I have actual nightmares about developing in Delphi. I can't believe there's a Delphi project that people speak this highly of.

The one thing Delphi really did wrong was to make GUI programming too easy. It was just too simple, too tempting, to just put all your code into your MainForm.pas, making it grow to over 10'000 LOC. If (and only if) the programmers took care to avoid code duplication and cared about writing good, solid code, Delphi rocked. Just like Lazarus (http://www.lazarus-ide.org/) does today. One of my weapons of choice nowadays when it comes to GUI development.

Re: Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL (1982)

#24
post #5

One of the programs closest to my heart which I use multiple times a day, "Beyond Compare" is written in PASCAL, Delphi more specifically. I know very little about PASCAL, but I know that Beyond Compare is rock solid.

I have actual nightmares about developing in Delphi. I can't believe there's a Delphi project that people speak this highly of.

Delphi was a wonderful product. Super fast compilation, nice IDE, small executables with no runtimes.

Age of Wonders was written with Delphi also. Great game.

Re: Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL (1982)

#25
Related: Real Men Don't Play GURPS: http://www.zipworld.com.au/~hong/dnd/realmen.htm (slight trigger warning: the "Real Men use swords to..." list ends on a line which can be read as quite rapey, though I don't think it was intended that way.)

(Note: it is a Windows-1292 document, correctly identified that way by a tag, which is incorrectly given a UTF-8 charset by a Content Type header. Therefore if the weird symbols are too distracting, you can save it to the hard drive and load it into a browser from there, and the symbols will resolve properly.)

It is worth reading for the line, "If you can't do it with a sword, do it with a fireball. If you can't do it with a fireball, it isn't worth doing."

Re: Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL (1982)

#26
post #5

One of the programs closest to my heart which I use multiple times a day, "Beyond Compare" is written in PASCAL, Delphi more specifically. I know very little about PASCAL, but I know that Beyond Compare is rock solid.

I have actual nightmares about developing in Delphi. I can't believe there's a Delphi project that people speak this highly of.

Delphi's still around. You can even write mobile apps in it.

http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi

Re: Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL (1982)

#27

> Compilers with array bounds checking (...) stifle creativity, (...) and make it impossible to modify the operating system code with negative subscripts. Absolute classic. The words to live by.

I'm going to be honest, I miss those days. Granted I used to have to wipe my machine every month at least, and things became horribly corrupt, but it was fun.

Re: Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL (1982)

#29
post #5

One of the programs closest to my heart which I use multiple times a day, "Beyond Compare" is written in PASCAL, Delphi more specifically. I know very little about PASCAL, but I know that Beyond Compare is rock solid.

I have actual nightmares about developing in Delphi. I can't believe there's a Delphi project that people speak this highly of.

Delphi is great and powerful, but it was so easy that a lot of people did bad things with it, ruining it's name.
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