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Comment by fenesiistvan | Hacker News Reader

What should be the problem with Pascal? I have the impression that here on HN most post are about latest/hyped tools, but the "real" industry is done with boring/old fashionated tools. Your post just confirms my toughs since you are using terms like "cloud-native" which sounds like marketing boolshit to me, but such terms are common here on HN. (And I am not against HN in general, it is my favorite website, but I learned a long time ago that I should treat it with a bit of salt regarding hyped tools and technologies)

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ISO Pascal from the 1980s was popular as a teaching language but it was missing many features needed for systems programming. In my high school they used Pascal for introductory programming classes on a Digital VAX-11/730. The limitations would leave many people taking a class like that who were aware of other programming languages thinking it was a toy language.

Apple came out with Object Pascal in the early 1980s which was the official programming language for the Lisa and original Mac. Borland came out with Turbo Pascal that went through numerous iterations and by the end of the 1980s I thought it was much better than C for the IBM PC but I switched to C in college because it was portable and would run on 32-bit Sun workstations.

By grad school I had jumped into Linux with both feet and had given up on DOS and Windows, around that point Borland came out with Delphi which was basically "Object Pascal for Windows" and was a direct competitor for Microsoft's Visual Basic intended for developing GUI applications quickly.

Today there are still people who remember Delphi fondly and there are quite a few Delphi clones out there.

I'm somewhat bemused that your school ran the toy ISO Pascal on a VAX, because VMS came with its own version of Pascal! VAX/VMS Pascal had some cool language extensions that made it extremely suited and extremely popular for VAX/VMS Systems Programming! VAX Pascal supported native VMS strings intrinsically whereas in VAX C you had to use cumbersome string descriptors to pass strings from C to the VAX/VMS RTL or Starlet (System Libraries). Ah happy memories, I miss VAX/VMS...

It might have been the full DEC pascal but we were taught to write standard Pascal.

I was in college in the early 80s at UCSC, the VAXen were running BSD UNIX. Many of the professors hated C, and made us use UCSD Pascal, which had uh, limitations... Like fixed size arrays and oh, the free function didn't actually free anything.

> Borland came out with Turbo Pascal that went through numerous iterations and by the end of the 1980s I thought it was much better than C for the IBM PC

I was first taught proper programming on Turbo Pascal in 1992 as a summer class (for nerdy kids obviously) I took when I was 11. It was taught by some undergrad student from what would eventually be my alma mater. I have very vague, but very fond, memories of that experience :-)

Was "boolshit" deliberate, or just a typo? For marketing hype about computer programming languages, it seems like the perfect term. So, whether deliberate or accidental, well done!

wow, my brain autocorrected that typo when I read it. maybe because i agree with the sentiment. i thought you were the weird one until i went back to re-read it. but now that you pointed it out, i do like it and think i'm going to be adding it to my vocabulary

I'd consider an accurate description of the precedence for the boolean operators. They're treated as equivalent to their arithmetic cognates (~ == not, * == and, + == or) forcing you to use excessive parentheses to separate terms. Notably, this is something that Wirthian styled Ada didn't copy.

Reminds me of this old conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19877916

I mean are Google, MS, Amazon, etc. not "real" companies?

Well, if your argument was true then none would use pascal/Delphi, as they'd only use Java and PHP.

Fyi, cloud native means that your application is written to utilize cloud services such as S3, dynamodb, dynamic scaling etc. It often comes with vendor lock-in and is not necessarily the best choice, but calling it a pure marketing term sounds a little ignorant

I think that more often than not the effort to avoid vendor lock-in isn't worth it, especially when it is very common for your "generic" wrapper around cloud services to over time bake in assumptions specific to the one platform you ever run it on and be, in effect, locked in anyway.

Is "real industry" hiring millions of Pascal programmers?

You don't have to like things, but lying to yourself about how useful they are doesn't help you.

Have you developed code cloud native?

It's not magic but writing software cloud native and modern feels easier better and faster.

It's easier to write, faster to write, easier and faster and more stable to operate and to configure.

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