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Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

I learned Modula-2 in college 30+ years ago (hot on the heels of Pascal, which I used for Mac development), and actually sort of liked it, but C was king across VAXen and UNIXes, so I went that way and never looked back.

I am still pretty amazed at the size and performance of Pascal-like compilers, and still smile whenever I come across ancient code with Pascal calling conventions, but am also sort of happy I don't have to type BEGIN and END ever again (or brackets--I became a Python and LISP fan).

I have to wonder if there is anything _as good_ from a compiler perspective but with a nicer syntax.

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In my opinion Go is the most Pascal like language that exists today due to fast compilation speed and extremely opinionated pursuit of oversimplifying the language at the detriment of usability.

> extremely opinionated pursuit of oversimplifying the language at the detriment of usability.

Subjective usability. Objectively, the language is quite usable, and many people even prefer it over the many other choices otherwise available to them.

Go has the nice quality (shared with Pascal) that it pretty much sticks to being a set of computer instructions, which means when you read Go it's easy to understand more or less exactly what the computer is doing. Great for auditing. Not so great for building large systems as abstractions over types.

"Not so great for building large systems that are hard to audit due to the level of type abstraction they have access to."

I'll give you that the lack of extensibility is sometimes a unique frustration among programming languages, but this design choice was intentional, and you've incidentally highlighted that, I think.

If it’s not usable, why is there so much useful software written in Go?

I haven’t had a lot of trouble writing some interesting things in Go that I’ve found difficult to redo in C++ with similar simplicity.

Sometimes a language doesn’t need a ton of bells and whistles to be usable.

Wirth understood this and accomplished much.

Consider how we’ve been able to fix Voyager - simplicity can save.

It's not unusable, just as Pascal wasn't unusable.

It can be very tedious though, e.g. the way errors are handled.

Someone just needs to create a less tedious language that is a thin layer on top of Go. Go++?

Surely Free Pascal is the most Pascal language that exists and is actively developed today?

Delphi is still around.

Kudos to FreePascal folks though.

Nope, that would be FreePascal and Delphi, fast compilation, without paying for a spartan language.

I sort of like Go, but also can't bring myself to write it that often. I don't know why--although part if it is fetching libraries directly from git repos.

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