Hacker News Reader

Comment by dionys | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to see Pascal on the list - it was the language of choice in my high school and my first programming language, back in 2010. I haven't touched it since, but I do remember it was pretty easy for me to pickup the syntax, especially compared to languages I would learn later in uni, like say C.

View on HN

In Lithuania and perhaps in similar countries Pascal is still main programming language in classrooms. Also no other language has beaten Pascal in number of released books so it will stay for very long time.

I almost started a new retrocomputing-related project in pascal recently because FreePascal seems to be the only stable maintained toolchain that still can target 8086

I can confirm! My high school was in Slovakia and I know other people had the same experience with Pascal.

I still write almost all my code in Pascal

It compiles very fast to native code, has properties with implicit setters/getters, null-safe strings with mutability xor aliasing, function and operator overloading.

It is really amazing

Wait, Pascal was in use in 2010? I thought it was a dead language when I used it in high school in 1997-1998.

Pascal has been in an incredibly strange state of being both dead and alive simultaneously for the past thirty years.

...but yeah, it was definitely doing pretty good throughout the 1990s.

"That is not dead which can eternal lie, / And with strange aeons even languages may die."

I know Turing (which is pascal packed up with a graphics library and manual and editor all in one exe) was in use in Ontario Schools as late as 2010.

Weird right? I learned Pascal in highschool in Ontario around 2010 as well. I remember being really frustrated at the time because we weren't learning some modern language like Java or Python. Instead we were stuck with Turbo Pascal, writing in an IDE so old it only supported 8 character long filenames. Thank god we had an amazing teacher which ended up making it one of the best CS classes I've ever taken.

Well, depending if you count Free Pascal and Delphi (aka Object Pascal) or only Wirth's original Pascal, it is still used today.

Turkey bought Delphi licenses for a million students just a couple' months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22116275

It took me years before I stopped accidentally typing ":=" in my C code.

I switch quite often. Sometimes 3 languages a day: Delphi/Lazarus/FreePascal, C++ and Javascript so it now takes few minutes to adjust.

I try not to switch too often, just because I find it hard to remember the details. The one that always stumps me the most is comments -- I always stare for several seconds trying to remember how comments work in that language.

Oh, I completely agree. I do not switch because I want to, but because I have to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com