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Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

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Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

#21

Post by jerf »

jchw wrote: post #8

Hmm 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…

"Channels are nice, until they are not. I feel as though it's easier, though not necessarily easy, to write correct programs using mutexes than Go channels in many cases."

The rule for mutexes is, never take more than one. As long as you only ever take one, life is pretty good.

When all you had was mutexes as your primitive, though, that became a problem. One is not enough. You can't build a big program on mutexes, and taking only one at a time.

But as you add other concurrency primitives to take the load off of the lowly mutex, and as you do, the mutex returns to viability. I use a lot of mutexes in my Go code, and I can, precisely because when I have a case where I need to select from three channels in some complicated multi-way, multi-goroutine choice, I have the channels for that case. The other concurrency mechanisms take the hard cases, leaving the easy cases for mutexes to be fine for once again.

The story of software engineering in the 1990s was a story of overreactions and misdiagnoses. This was one of them. Mutexes weren't the problem; misuse of them was. Using them as the only primitive was. You really, really don't want to take more than one at a time. That goes so poorly that I believe it nearly explains the entire fear of multithreading picked up from that era. (The remainder comes from trying to multithread in a memory-unsafe language, which is also a pretty big mistake.) Multithreading isn't trivial, but it isn't that hard... but there are some mistakes that fundamentally will destroy your sanity and trying to build a program around multiple mutexes being taken is one of them.

(To forestall corrections, the technical rule is always take mutexes in the same order. I consider experience to have proved that doesn't scale, plus, honestly, just common sense shows that it isn't practical. So I collapse that to a rule: Never have more than held at a time. As soon as you see you need more than one, use a different mechanism. Do whatever it takes to your program to achieve that; whatever shortcut you have in mind that you think will be good enough, you're wrong. Refactor correctly.)

Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

#22

Post by wolfi1 »

runlaszlorun wrote: post #20

I 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 fol…

Wirth's disdain for C++ leads sometimes to chuckles in the audience at public lectures("C with 2 plusses")

Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

#23

Post by foobarian »

wiz21c wrote: post #17
soliton4 wrote: post #10

pascal 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 !

Not to mention you had a running program milliseconds after Ctrl-F9. I get modern apps require so much more stuff to run but I still miss that zippy experience.

Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

#24

Post by pkolaczk »

misja111 wrote: post #14
astrodust wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The later versions (somewhere after 2005) were also very buggy and sluggish. They produced fast code, but you really needed a powerful workstation.

Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

#25

Post by PumpkinSpice »

runlaszlorun wrote: post #20

I 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 fol…

I'm surprised that you draw a sharp distinction between C and Pascal syntax. They have a shared lineage and are really very close to each other. Yeah, curly braces won over "begin" and "end", but that's not a matter of some huge conceptual rift, just convenience.

There are numerous languages today, including Haskell and Ocaml, that are far more removed from the Algol lineage than these two. Heck, the differences between Rust and C are probably more pronounced than between C and Pascal.

Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

#26

Post by JAlexoid »

wolfi1 wrote: post #22
runlaszlorun wrote: post #20

I 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 fol…

Wirth's disdain for C++ leads sometimes to chuckles in the audience at public lectures("C with 2 plusses")

> C with 2 plusses

I read it as "C with two pulses"... Which is how I feel about C++ - unnecessarily complicated.

Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

#27

Post by broken-kebab »

jchw wrote: post #8

Hmm 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…

I think it's better to avoid time-related adjectives like "archaic" when talking about PLs. For starters it doesn't really mean much in general: in software development fashions come, and go, and then reappear as "new" again. Secondly, Pascal syntax is of the same historical age as that of C, and the ML languages. Would you say that C# (or Haskell) is syntactically archaic?

Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

#28

Post by jchw »

jerf wrote: post #21
jchw wrote: post #8

Hmm 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…

"Channels are nice, until they are not. I feel as though it's easier, though not necessarily easy, to write correct programs using mutexes than Go channels in many cases." The rule for mutexes is, never take more than one. As long as you only ever take one, life is pretty good. When all you had was mutexes as your primitive, though, that became a problem. One is not enough. You can't build a big program on mutexes, a…

Yeah, I can relate to this. When coding in Go I routinely combine mutexes and channels. Channels are useful for signalling and some other things. I am a bit miffed though since it absolutely feels like CSP concurrency and message passing COULD be better, it's just not in Go. Maybe I'll try Erlang some day and be imbued with the curse of knowledge.

Rust doesn't solve the problem of multiple mutexes being tricky, but it does at least solve most of the other problems with sharing memory. To gain a little more assurance with Go, I do sometimes use the checklocks analyzer from gVisor, which gets you some of the way.

Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

#29

Post by switchbak »

runlaszlorun wrote: post #20

I 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 fol…

Well some of the great ideas of yesteryear are having a bit of a rebirth. Many of the safety concerns of Ada are being brought into the limelight with Rust. And of course Erlang blew up a while back after spending forever in the (relative) shadows.

Overall we're still stuck in a bit of a near-monoculture of JS(TS) and Python, but it's a far cry from back in the day where there was very little openness to the sole blessed corporate stack (Typically Java or C#/CLR). I think we can only handle so many mainstream languages, but I do love all the experimentation and openness going on.

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