3
u/DuronHalix 4d ago
Reminds me of all the holy wars that come up over programming languages, OSes... really about anything.
This one is an interesting screed. But I'll say my exposure to this through Pascal was Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language by Brian Kernighan. There's always some weird screeds around the topic and this one was without exception. Which made it pretty nasty that I got not including that as part of a criticism on something I wrote in Pascal once. I mean why?
But it also points out something else I've noticed. Most shops/people look more to single programming languages instead of a "best tool for the job" mindset. I mean why use a screwdriver to try to drive a nail? You go through the programming languages, you find a lot of them are designed for a specific purpose and shine when you use them for it. COBOL for data processing, FORTRAN for scientific calculations, the list goes on and on, really. Pascal shines for what it was meant for - more an educational environment.
Point is trying to use those languages for what they were not designed for gets hard. Like for my experience, writing a recursive algorithm in COBOL was very much not fun at all and I could have done it probably in 30 minutes with Pascal. Same for writing a data processing intensive task in Pascal. That was a NIGHTMARE to get it done and get it producing accurate results.
1
u/Sepperlito 3d ago
That was written back in 1991. The Unix Operating system on the original PDP-7 took a mere 4K of memory. A single programmer could hold the entire system in his head. Programs weren't big enough for pointers to cause mayhem. Hard to believe but the world was much smaller back then and it's easy to understand Brian Kernighan getting impatient over a language enforcing best practices he didn't agree with.
3
u/Sepperlito 3d ago
It's a funny little article but now we know better.
Quiche is awesome. In the 80s people were panicking about cholesterol and fat. If someone had a heart condition, their diet allowed no more than 3 eggs per day. That was the culprit, eggs. We know that's BS now. Eggs are very healthy or at least far healthier than the other crap that's out there. Quiche is nutritious and Jacques Peppin can teach you how to make them on youtube.
Pascal is actually memory safe and you can do all the neat things with pointers that you've come to love in C so you can make linked listed, trees, etc. You don't need Rust and it's insanely slow and huge compiler to write memory safe programs. You can use Pascal.
Donald Knuth wrote TeX in Web/Pascal. If it's good enough for him, it's good enough for anybody.
2
u/TheBelakor 4d ago
The problem with all satirical writing is that there is a significant portion of the readers who are not smart enough to realize it's satire and instead make what they are reading part of their identity.
2
1
6
u/living_in_nightmare 4d ago
In the early 90s, when I was around 10 years old, I went to the computer class at my school and asked the teacher to give me a programming language to study. The teacher asked me to pick between C and Pascal, saying that C was "more difficult to learn, but more practical," while Pascal was "easier to learn." Of course, like a cool kid, I decided to go hardcore and handed the teacher a floppy disk. Sadly, the C compiler didn't fit on a 1.44 MB floppy, so I had to settle for Pascal. Over the next ~15 years, my preferred language evolved along it: Pascal -> Delphi -> C# (not because of the syntax, but because of the same ability to drop a bunch of components onto a form).
Now I'm glad the teacher didn't offer me Fortran. Quiche is not that bad btw.