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Comment by FullyFunctional | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotes:

Anders is a bit of a childhood hero of mine.

I got the BLS Pascal 1.2 and the shock of coming from line-based interpreted Microsoft BASIC to full-screen editor with lighting fast compiler in three keypresses (Ctrl-X, C, Return) is hard to describe. (Full-screen editing and compilation representing two quantum leaps).

Studing the internals of the BLS Pascal (Z80, Nascom 2) literally boggled my mind with the genius of the code which was unlike any other Z80 code I had read.

I was fortunate enough to meet the still young Anders at the "Herningmesse" where he was demonstrating Compas Pascal (running a Maze generator to attract eyeballs). He was very nice but I was too shy to ask the really good questions :)

I'm still actually chasing this. I have never managed to get a working version of BLS Pascal 1.3 but I know it exist (help would be most welcome - the one Google find you is corrupted).

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Ha. I, too, experienced this same shock when I moved, as a teenager, from MS-BASIC's editor to a Pascal-based (in my case it was Turbo) full-screen editor.

Ton be honest, for the first couple of hours I can recall being very confused about how I was to approch coding with no line numbers? How was I to move to other sections of my program? What, no GOTO...help!

Little did I know at the time almost all GOTO use is bad programming and that Pascal was such an elegant and dare-I-Say beautiful language to program in. It's fairly tame use of pointers (as compared with C smashing you over the head with them) really exposed me to one of CompSci's more powerful paradigms...indirect addressing.

And, OMG, the incredible speed of both the compiler and the programs it generated simply blew my mind...esp. since its very possible I was using a 8Mhz IBM PC/AT at the time. My simulations literally ran 25x faster.

Those were heady times to be a programmer IMHO...you literally had the count the number of bytes in your data structures to squeeze every bit of memory use out of your 64k stacks and 640k DOS limits, and all sorts of tricks were used to overcome these obstacles. ..

Controversy alert:

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but as best I remember I always lamented the verbosity of Pascal (I worked professionally for a time in Turbo Pascal). Modulo-2 was IMhO a much better language and had he used that, revised with a more concise syntax a-la C/C#/Rust, I think I would have been a lot happier. (I must resist the urge to go back and reimplement BLS Pascal the way I would have liked it).

Stepping back a bit, what really made Anders' early designs remarkable wasn't just the engineering, but the deliberate trade-off he made. He emphasized compilation time over almost everything (I think all contemporaries tried to generate as good code as possible). This priority is what dictated a one-pass compiler and in assembler. I saw the same unusual economy in his code where sometimes he would do things in a less efficient way, presumably because it saved code size.

I felt like the descriptions of Pascal suits Go well too. Although they are different languages, I felt like their design goals are really similar.

Well, yes, Modula-2 is the better language, particular for larger and system-level programs, but how is it less verbose?

It’s not, I was unclear. I wanted M2/Oberon? with a different, much less verbose syntax.

I actually went down the path of changing the Oberon parser to take a different syntax. My PoC worked but I didn’t complete it.

Anders was one of my early heroes too - way before people like Gates or Ellison were on the scene. I too graduated from BASIC to Turbo Pascal, and couldn't believe the speed differential, and learning about things like recursion etc.

I never met Anders, but I did meet someone who used to work with him at one point and who marvelled at how he use to write blocks or Assembly code off the top of his head when everyone else had to plot the instructions and registers on paper first.

To me he had too much of a Linus vibe. I never understood how people could look up to such people.

Linus, Anders, Lars Bak (and my humble self) are all Scandinavians. I have been told [far too many times] that we tend to be rather "direct" which often clashes with other cultures (most extreme counter example I've seen are the always polite Japanese).

I have no problem with people with an attitude. I just don't always agree with them (all of the aforementioned included).

As someone from a ddirect culture, I find that people who describe themselves as such just use it as am excuse to be rude.

Direct does not equate an absence of sensitivity and tact.

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