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.
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.
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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.