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Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

For those who don't know, Pascal was what a lot of the classic Mac software was written in, before Objective-C and Swift. It grew into Delphi, which was a popular low-code option on Windows.

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I wouldn’t describe Delphi as low code, it is an IDE. Wikipedia also describes it like this[1] and does not include it in its list of low code development platforms[2].

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_(software)

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_low-code_development...

It was a RAD platform though. From following your links:

> Low-code development platforms trace their roots back to fourth-generation programming language and the rapid application development tools of the 1990s and early 2000s.

> Delphi was originally developed by Borland as a rapid application development tool for Windows as the successor of Turbo Pascal.

It still is, and got a new release last month.

I wouldn’t know, I was like a Borland fan…

It's a shame that Pascal was largely abandoned (except for Delphi, which lived on for a while); I believe several Pascal compilers supported array bounds checking, and strings with a length field. In the 1980s this may have been considered overly costly (and perhaps it is considered so today as well), but the alternative that the computing field and industry picked was C, where unbounded arrays and strings were a common source of buffer overflow errors. Cleaning this up has taken decades and we still probably aren't done.

Better C/C++ compilers and libraries can help, but the original C language and standard library were certainly part of the issue. Java and JavaScript (etc.) may have their issues but at least chasing down pointer errors usually isn't one of them.

The industry picked C when Pascal was still widely supported, not as a result of it being abandoned.

A side effect of UNIX adoption, C already being in the box, whereas anything else would cost money, and no famous dialect (Object Pascal, VMS Pascal, Solaris Pascal, UCSD Pascal) being portable.

Unfortunately Pascal only mattered to legions of Mac and PC developers.

Picking C == abandoning Pascal (which had been commonly used for Mac and PC development.)

Delphi still lives on, to the extent that there is enough people to sell conference tickets in Germany, and a new release came out last month.

My father celebrated 60 two weeks back and told me he bought license for new Delphi and loves it, I was quite surprised with the development he described.

I considered telling him that he could get most of the things (he also buys various components) for free today, but then.. he is about 5 years before retirement and won't relearn all his craft now.

Myself, I am not sure whether its nostalgia but I miss the experience of Delphi 7 I started with 20 years back. In many ways, the simplicity of VLC and the interface is still unbeaten.

> My father celebrated 60 two weeks back

So about three months my senior.

> I considered telling him that he could get most of the things (he also buys various components) for free today, but then.. he is about 5 years before retirement and won't relearn all his craft now.

Free Pascal / Lazarus shouldn't be all that much to relearn.

> Myself, I am not sure whether its nostalgia but I miss the experience of Delphi 7 I started with 20 years back.

Delphi 1, 28 years now.

> In many ways, the simplicity of VLC and the interface is still unbeaten.

1) Yup.

2) VCL, btw.

3) Now that Embarcadero is hiking up the price of Delphi with every release, I think the standard-bearer for best librry / framework is probably the LCL, the Lazarus Component Library.

Thanks for the tips regarding Lazarus and LCL I will share them next time we meet.

AFAIK, even Photoshop was originally written in Pascal.

It was, according to Sean Parent (Adobe employee) in an interview about Pascal (around 8:03): https://adspthepodcast.com/2023/12/29/Episode-162.html

The Photoshop 1.0.1 source code is available from the Computer History Museum <https://computerhistory.org/blog/adobe-photoshop-source-code...>

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