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

Eventually I got old of Turbo Pascal 3.0, started learning there (yep a version below), then at school Turbo Pascal 5.5 was actually the programming language after Basic, so I got introduced to units, and Object Pascal.

Eventually due to an agreement with the teacher that if had a theme I wanted to learn more, I could study it and present to the class.

I choose OOP, which in the process made the owner of a Turbo Pascal 6.0 copy, with the wonderful Turbo Vision framework to learn from.

On the same year I bought a copy of Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5 (target Windows 3.x), with the Object Windows Library, a pleasure to work with versus bare bones Win32.

So when I go to learn C a couple of years later, it never impressed me, too little features, too unsafe, the only thing going for it was being available in more platforms than Turbo Pascal was.

Luckily the same class also had a Turbo C++ 1.0 package that was being ignored, and that brought me the Turbo Pascal features I was enjoying, alongside the portability that Turbo Pascal lacked.

From my point of view, only Microsoft and Apple tools seem to keep on the same developer tooling spirit and language capabilities.

Long answer,

UNIX spread like fire, because Bell Labs/AT&T initially weren't allowed to sell it.

So the code was given to university, and while they needed to pay for a UNIX license to use it, the price was symbolic versus paying for something like VMS.

Which naturally made UNIX the number one choice for the startups trying to get into the Workstation market during the 90's.

So C started to spread into the 8 and 16 bit computers in some form.

When those 8 and 16 bit home computers, written in Assembly, started to be replaced by more powerful systems, the OS vendors were adopting C as the language.

Most won't be aware of this today, but Microsoft did sell Xenix and MS-DOS at the same time, they sold Xenix as they decided to focus on MS-DOS instead. In fact, MS-DOS 4 failure was an attempt to make it more UNIX like.

At the same time, maybe to reduce costs, the OS vendors started to reduce the amount of compilers they were selling it for their platforms, selling only the same ones as they were using themselves for the OS, which by then naturally meant C.

Any other language started to be available only from third parties, and most of the time without bindings to all OS APIs.

So given the choice of buying the language programming tools from the OS vendor, with everything ready to code, or paying even more (you would need the OS SDK anyway) and having to code bindings, the majority stayed with OS SDK only.

As C++ is a C sibling, coming from UNIX birthplace, it quickly found a place among C compiler vendors tooling.

Java, well it was pushing by Sun, quickly adopted by Microsoft, IBM and Oracle on their platforms.

So enjoyed a bit that extra love from platform owners.

Having lived through this evolution, I have learned only to bet on platform languages, or those that eventually get blessed by platform owners on their official SDKs.