A lot of my earliest programming experiences were with Pascal. Apple Pascal in high school on Apple IIe and II+ machines. Later, Turbo Pascal on my dad's PC. I worked with the developer of IBM's Oberon system for OS/2 something like 20 years ago, and he considered it among his favorite things he'd ever worked on.
Every time I see a Borland style interface or that weird Pascal syntax, I flash back, and remember that feeling of...something like power; the ability to make the computer do anything you wanted, not just what you could already buy/pirate on disk.
That said, there's a reason I didn't keep using Turbo Pascal once I had access to C and Perl on Linux systems. Some things are better than others, and Turbo Pascal and things like Turbo Pascal are nostalgic, but not exactly good. (Then again, I'm working on games for C64, so nostalgia does things to a body.)
wood_spirit 2 hours ago [-]
For me turbo pascal - with inline assembly - was the pinnacle. I got into c and later c++ because I had to, but always found the symbols slightly harder on the eyes and surprisingly not faster to type. And I was always frustrated by the bloat of the executables and the much slower compilation times. And the runtime speed - I was doing a lot of assembly, it was something I became interested in even on projects that didn’t need it - was actually much faster in TP. It was, in my eyes, the perfect blend of easy on the eyes syntax, blazingly fast compilation and runtime and small easy to share executables.
Then of course Delphi came along and made all that true for windows apps too!
So somehow I chime with how your comment starts but have such different memories of how it ends :)
pjmlp 2 hours ago [-]
Before Delphi, there was Turbo Pascal for Windows already, with Object Windows Library.
Versions 1.0 and 1.5.
pjmlp 2 hours ago [-]
I am so glad to have had the luck to learn coding via various BASIC flavours, Turbo Pascal, Z80, 8086 Assembly before getting into C and C++, as I wasn't tainted about C being God's revelation for systems programming, that many seem to have.
After learning C, I quickly switched to C++, alongside Pascal, and stayed on Borland ecosystem until Visual C++ 6.0 came to be, followed by .NET.
On UNIX, C++ was my Typescript for C, as back then there wasn't FreePascal, and most Pascal implementations for UNIX sucked, plain standard Pascal, or P2C.
I also had the pleasure to have a myriad of other programming languages, including Oberon, yes it was rather cool for its time.
The way most modern languages have gone back to Pascal style development feels quite enjoyable.
Barrin92 5 hours ago [-]
My first experience with Pascal was only a few years ago by way of Lazarus which is now my go-to tool whenever I need to build a GUI for myself. Genuinely enjoy it and find it a much more pleasant experience than C. I'm sort of sad I missed the heyday of the Borland tooling because it seems incredibly productive even without nostalgia.
lysace 5 hours ago [-]
> Then again, I'm working on games for C64, so nostalgia does things to a body.
You should check out Turbo Rascal (...), but you probably already did.
The version which I would really like to see would be a native distribution for the Raspberry Pi of the Oberon Workstation environment --- apparently there is a problem with the drivers which makes porting difficult.
The linked project web site (https://free.oberon.org/en) proudly features a video with a thumbnail showing a rendition of the USSR's parliament, the so called Supreme Soviet, with some screenshots added in.
Extremely poor taste.
nine_k 4 hours ago [-]
I suppose it's just imagery from the heyday of Wirth's Oberon, ca 1987.
BTW Oberon was / is not just a language, but a whole very interesting interactive computing environment.
shrubble 6 hours ago [-]
I think some of the devs are Russian and a quick scan of the video doesn't show anything other than a shared screen for the bulk of the time (using the mouse to grab the time pointer and move it quickly through the length of the presentation).
veqq 23 minutes ago [-]
Pascal is quite common in Russia - many schools teach comp sci with it.
throwaway7356 57 minutes ago [-]
They use Yandex for e-mail, so probably a Russian group behind this.
Sure. But there are also a significant number of people who are nostalgic for it and might be offended by this use for that reason, hence why I asked.
Given the existence of both groups I think just the claim that it’s offensive, without explaining why, is ambiguous and just reacting defensively doesn’t address that.
tgv 3 hours ago [-]
Given all we know about the USSR, I don't think anyone needs to explain why. This plus your other comment suggest you're replying in bad faith.
Mikhail_Edoshin 2 hours ago [-]
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
2 hours ago [-]
eschaton 3 hours ago [-]
Nope. I just evidently know people with more varied opinions on the USSR than you do. (Including people who grew up there.)
jibal 2 hours ago [-]
Indeed, that accusation of bad faith is such blatant projection ... essentially "It's bad faith to disagree with me, and there's no need for me to justify my claims."
This whole diversion is off topic and can be seen as a form of bad faith.
lysace 7 hours ago [-]
That's bait. Go find your history school books. Byebye.
eschaton 7 hours ago [-]
How about you just explain what you mean?
You’re the one who made the statement. It’s on you to support it.
6 hours ago [-]
koutakun 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sph 4 hours ago [-]
What’s that got to do with FreeOberon?
monkeywork 6 hours ago [-]
More info please? I have severe doubts that GOG actually had that intent.
shakna 6 hours ago [-]
This one [0]. Which German QA picked up and said 'no way', and so German customers didn't get the newsletter. But everyone else still did.
Every time I see a Borland style interface or that weird Pascal syntax, I flash back, and remember that feeling of...something like power; the ability to make the computer do anything you wanted, not just what you could already buy/pirate on disk.
That said, there's a reason I didn't keep using Turbo Pascal once I had access to C and Perl on Linux systems. Some things are better than others, and Turbo Pascal and things like Turbo Pascal are nostalgic, but not exactly good. (Then again, I'm working on games for C64, so nostalgia does things to a body.)
Then of course Delphi came along and made all that true for windows apps too!
So somehow I chime with how your comment starts but have such different memories of how it ends :)
Versions 1.0 and 1.5.
After learning C, I quickly switched to C++, alongside Pascal, and stayed on Borland ecosystem until Visual C++ 6.0 came to be, followed by .NET.
On UNIX, C++ was my Typescript for C, as back then there wasn't FreePascal, and most Pascal implementations for UNIX sucked, plain standard Pascal, or P2C.
I also had the pleasure to have a myriad of other programming languages, including Oberon, yes it was rather cool for its time.
The way most modern languages have gone back to Pascal style development feels quite enjoyable.
You should check out Turbo Rascal (...), but you probably already did.
https://lemonspawn.com/turbo-rascal-syntax-error-expected-bu... (outdated cert)
https://github.com/leuat/TRSE/
https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem3Native
Extremely poor taste.
BTW Oberon was / is not just a language, but a whole very interesting interactive computing environment.
How so?
Given the existence of both groups I think just the claim that it’s offensive, without explaining why, is ambiguous and just reacting defensively doesn’t address that.
This whole diversion is off topic and can be seen as a form of bad faith.
You’re the one who made the statement. It’s on you to support it.
[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/games/gog-apologizes-for-emailing-na...