by aarroyoc on 4/1/23, 10:33 AM with 37 comments
by coreyp_1 on 4/3/23, 2:02 AM
In the 90's, I had no Internet. The library (neither school nor public) had no programming books. My high school had no CS/programming classes. The computer class (word processor/spreadsheet usage) teacher did not know anything about programming, but she knew that I liked computers. One day, she gave me a big yellow box and said "I don't know anything about this, but I thought that you might like to play with it."
All that I had was 3.5" diskettes and the manuals. Those manuals were written so well that I taught myself programming by reading them and their examples. I still remember the day that I figured out what a pointer was, simply by their example code.
I am forever grateful to that teacher, as well as the writers of those manuals. Today, I have a PhD in CS, but I have never had a programming class (I have taught them, however). It was the design of the Pascal language that allowed for that.
I'm glad that it is still going.
by hougaard on 4/3/23, 4:08 AM
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central has a built-in development environment with a language called AL. AL is a variant of Pascal.
A bit of background, Pascal was very popular in Denmark in the 80'ties and 90'ties (Turbo Pascal was created by a Dane, Anders Hejlsberg, later Delphi, c# and TypeScript fame). Business Central was a Danish piece of software created for IBM before Microsoft acquired it, so choosing Pascal as the base language was a very natural thing.
I got my first job because IBM needed Pascal developers for this new accounting system they got and I already knew Turbo Pascal.
Today the AL compiler is built on Roslyn (same as the c# compiler) and have a fully capable language server supporting all the fancy intellisence stuff in VS Code, also supported by GitHub CoPilot.
p.s. I even created my own AL compiler, written in AL https://www.hougaard.com/toolbox
by themodelplumber on 4/3/23, 6:19 AM
The one I use, fpc/Lazarus, is one of those projects where people seem to use it for very significant work to a very high degree of personal satisfaction, but often to very little fanfare.
Like let's say you built the world's fastest JSON viewer with it (already done, I think).
Or you built a pretty amazing orthodox file manager with it (DC).
Or a great little text editor? Cudatext. The author wrote a plugin at my casual mention of the topic of snippets that could run external commands, which I thought was awesome of them.
Lazpaint is also pretty neat and I was able to make a pseudo-3D render with it. Very nice set of tools.
Those are each a pretty big deal in their own ways. But these days there's another public-presence layer to development, where people want to find Mr. Lazarus chocolate bars on the shelf at their local store before they'll trust that it's worth their time, maybe. (I hear creator brands are pretty much everything right now?)
Yet, the fact that it's around, well maintained, and used in very impressive projects, still means a lot to those who are interested in what it can do.
And, I guess it still does some new stuff as needed. Pas2JS, webassembly, etc.
https://www.freepascal.org/~michael/pas2js-demos/wasienv/can...
And that's just thinking about fpc/Laz... There's much more to the Pascal world than this.
by xiaodai on 4/3/23, 12:00 AM
by pkaye on 4/3/23, 4:56 AM
by kylecazar on 4/3/23, 12:44 AM
Pascal was my first language, but only because it happened to be used for scripting repetitive tasks for a game I played. I had a blast, even though there were far more modern options.
by xarromaster on 4/3/23, 8:39 AM
by bearjaws on 4/3/23, 3:25 AM
It is a solid language, but I wouldn't really recommend picking it up today.
by bdcravens on 4/3/23, 3:09 AM
by anta40 on 4/3/23, 5:51 PM
Wonder why those languages didn't get industry/FOSS adoption as much as Pascal did?
by phendrenad2 on 4/3/23, 2:28 AM
by chinabot on 4/3/23, 4:05 AM