31–40 of 102 posts
Cut a long story short, Ive installed Dr Racket today and working through the tutorials.
Some recent personal projects with laz and fp got me pretty interested in it. I have nothing impressive to show for my work except for a lot of retro-pride when I type in e.g. the snippet which triggers the Pascal program which tells me how old I am. With some bells and maybe a couple whistles. I was surprised to learn that there was Pascal for the C64, which I thought was more of a "BASIC or bare metal" system. I to…
But, I tried FP last year. I wrote a program to mimic a small tool in the company I worked for. It was fun actually. At the time, I sort of wanted a lot to write stuff in Emacs. There is an LSP server for FP but it's not really complete.
Pascal killed my interest in programming for a while as it was force fed in both high school and earlier collage years. Reflecting back, it was the pessimistic approach to teaching of just pushing math problems via programming.
they just didn't know how to teach back then. they could approach the same math from the other side, by starting to write games. and gradually come to game math. that would be more interesting, and then it would become obvious why one may need some math while programming.
I guess it depends on the school and people there to create a fun but educational culture.
I laugh out loud when I remember it, definitely the programming language with the most funny/catchy name ever!
Pascal gets an underserved bad reputation. I am showing my age but Turbo Pascal was (is) great. Extensions from Turbo and Delphi Object Pascal is great as well. I hate the insane pricing Embarcado has imposed on Delphi. They have had cross platform GUIs in Delphi for a long time. Something for some reason other tools struggle and mostly fail to do. I have not been able to "sell" it to clients mostly due to price.
Embarcadero insane pricing of Delphi is the reason I haven't continued beyond my old version Xe2. I guess they are making hay while the sun shines with the locked-in customers.
Programming languages have advanced _a lot_ since Pascal was created. It's core principles remain valid (safety by default, readability, flexibility). But the feedback loop between language design and actual usage is much tighter thanks to the Internet and open source.
Some things I still miss from my Delphi days are the language-level enumsets, near-instant compilation and RAD tooling (GUI builder).
Pascal killed my interest in programming for a while as it was force fed in both high school and earlier collage years. Reflecting back, it was the pessimistic approach to teaching of just pushing math problems via programming.
My mom taught programming in the early 80s. She took a course at the nearby community college, and a year later, was teaching the course. Her background was... high school math teacher. She said: "Programming is just math, a program is like a proof." Fortunately I loved math and proofs, so that way of thinking wasn't an obstacle for me. Clearly we know differently now.
I used to be a hard Delphi/Pascal guy and still think it is much better than C for it's strong typing and overall "squareness". But I'd have a hard time going back to it nowadays. The 'var' section, magic "Result" variable and begin/end pairs are just from another age. Programming languages have advanced _a lot_ since Pascal was created. It's core principles remain valid (safety by default, readability, flexibility).…
Pascal killed my interest in programming for a while as it was force fed in both high school and earlier collage years. Reflecting back, it was the pessimistic approach to teaching of just pushing math problems via programming.
Pascal is a great language for programming games as is evidenced from Delphi Quake and Delphi Quake 2 projects https://sourceforge.net/projects/delphiquake/ I believe the right approach to programming is graphics for kids.
I used to be a hard Delphi/Pascal guy and still think it is much better than C for it's strong typing and overall "squareness". But I'd have a hard time going back to it nowadays. The 'var' section, magic "Result" variable and begin/end pairs are just from another age. Programming languages have advanced _a lot_ since Pascal was created. It's core principles remain valid (safety by default, readability, flexibility).…
After using VCL for a year or two, I started branching to other, much more popular programming environments, and was shocked about how bad they were for GUI development. Why would anyone put themselves through the pain of writing interfaces manually using programming languages not designed for it (like C) when you could design everything in a convenient GUI builder?
It's sad they decided to focus on the "enterprise" market and buried themselves in the long term. Writing GUI stuff in Delphi was (probably is) a pleasure: they compiled quickly, looked native, and ran fast on my shitty hardware.