Hacker News Reader

Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

Didn’t Pascal die due to some combination of C and Javas popularity and Borland team getting poached by Microsoft in the late 90s?

View on HN

Pascal graduated to Delphi (Object-pascal with built-in GUI designer), and had a very healthy run for a decade and was my favorite language until Borland corporate stuff happened and a cross-licensing deal with Microsoft that turned Delphi into a sort of bastard sibling of .NET, and new owner Embercadero raised prices out of the reach of most of the small-time users that made up a bulk of the userbase. I was in a tiny factory-automation engineering group that used it to build user interfaces and data reporting for all the factory stations. Well, on that note, 3M corporate shut down the factory and moved it to China, so maybe other forces were in play to kill the userbase.

Was is Delphi creator who left Borland, created C#, then TypeScript?

Anders Hejlsberg.

In my youth, I learned basic then Pascal before taking compsci in high school. Despite the fact that I was confident in both, your course supported both languages, but by far the "not a programmer" types chose VB and that was their speed and it's was fine. For those of us that really enjoyed programming, we learned and loved Pascal/Delphi more, but I'd argue most of us transitioned to C/java afterwards. Delphi took a middle ground approach that wasn't entirely successful to either of these groups.

I still think the biggest mistake MS made with their tooling was burying VB6+ and replaced it with VB.net. They may have made VB a "real" function extensive language, but I think a bunch of soft-programming people just left and never went back. C# ate any of those that would've used VB.net in this way anyways IMHO.

When I was first exposed to C (perhaps in Byte Magazine), I was dead certain that Pascal would win out. I wonder if the minor optimizations achieved by programming closer to bare iron on early computers led to a minor performance advantage that outweighed the need for readable / maintainable code.

C did compile to more efficient code than Pascal, but The Delphi compiler processed code 10x faster than the C compiler, and hit an amazing sweet spot for the 300Mhz workstations of the day, where you could iterate through edit/compile/run in Delphi just as fast as Visual Basic, and when you were done the program ran an order of magnitude faster than VB (and maybe 90% as fast as C). Also, because the language was easier to parse, the tooling was able to interact with your code way better than Borland's same product for C++ or any of Microsoft's products, so you were getting more accurate code completion and context-sensitive help and all that.

I believe that Delphi was a vastly superior product to any of its contemporaries, and was killed purely by corporate forces.

C and Pascal were both fast, but C allowed programmers to dynamically allocate and free memory without having to deal with 255 character limits and other limitations imposed by Pascal. It also allowed us to create some magnificent bugs, too.

My sense was Delphi was replaced more by Visual Basic, though it's entirely possible that's based on my personal experience and didn't represent a larger trend.

Turbo Pascal was popular because it was cheap at a time when buying a compiler could cost hundreds of dollars. But it really never got picked up widely beyond Borland products. BASIC options got a bit better. And, yes, C and Java were popular for "serious" programming.

Depends on what is your opinion about Delphi and Embarcadero

Reply on news.ycombinator.com