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Comment by snapcaster | Hacker News Reader

In the age of AI, i'm never using obscure languages again because AI isn't as good with them

By that logic, if modern LLMs existed in the 80s, you’d have never learned Haskell, Ocaml, Rust, Go, Erlang, … and all the cool concepts and ideas that came with them. You’d still be programming Basic and Fortran, simply because that’s all the models knew.

AI may be helpful at times, but to limit one’s self to only the knowledge and experience they have is… short sighted at best.

You got a point here however I would just flip his argument. It is best to rely on LLMs that have a lot of training data exposure, and here is Python etc. dominating over Delphi.

I for example find LLMs not useful in regards to coding on 6510 or 68000 especially in assembler when developing code for a product of the demo scene.

x86 became pretty useful lately, but still, on certain machines with bit manipulation, you would better take your time to triple check your code and don't rely on LLM.

I would love to see a change here.

Unfortunately this is what AI is leading to. People will stop learning new languages and companies will stop developing new ones because AI is now supposed to write code.

I agree, I envison that we will reach a state where the tooling will be generating executables directly.

As next step of low code/no code tooling, the agent will do the actions for us.

We are already seeing this on SaaS offerings.

I tried to make some LLMs write (GW-)BASIC and they failed miserably. Maybe they were only trained on some modern BASIC that doesn't look like BASIC at all? Could not convince them to use line numbers at all. Maybe with a lot of context they could do it, but my prompts did not work, even making I clear I wanted line numbers.

(Free)Pascal seems to work great though. I think enough of that is in training data that it can be used as well as any language. There isn't much special to consider to get it right. It is not like figuring out how to do Rust or C++.

You might be right. Have you seriously considered that you're wrong though? What if you're investing a dead craft and it never pays off? have you engaged with that idea and rejected it?

There’s two sides to your question, I think:

- professionally (for money) - personally (for knowledge’s sake)

Regarding the former, I’m nearing retirement age, so personally I don’t care as much; I’m no longer “investing [in] a dead craft”. Assuming it is dead (I don’t think it is).

Re the latter, I have rejected it. I love problem solving. And I consider programming a tool I use to solve problems. Regardless of whether it’s an LLM or my old C text book, if I limited myself to only what came before me, then I can’t possibly improve on the current situation. My solutions would be in a perpetual state of stagnation. I can’t speak for others, but that sounds boring AF to me.

So then it's a life stage thing. You're already well established in your career, and you'd rather some intellectual engagement. There's nothing wrong with that.

A 22 year old fresh out of undergrad almost certainly wants actual money far more than they want intellectual engagement. Most of them are better served by picking up a boring workhorse language that they can reliably get paid to write. Inevitably some will speciate into more esoteric fields, but that's the exception, not the rule.

People wanting shortcuts and to do less work/thinking is about to become the major force in society over the next generation.

Cheaper but worse unfortunately will win in most cases.

At least it’ll eventually become easier to distinguish oneself with something better. You’ll just always be slower.

Feed it documentation and example code and given sufficient data of these, it will do just fine with obscure languages. I have tried it with programming languages as obscure as Odin, for example, and it worked nicely. It is way more awful writing Forth, for one. YMMV.

Reinforces the A in AI... "artificial" intelligence. Actual intelligence could pick up a new language no problem.

Programming languages are tools in a toolbox. Use the proper tool for the job instead of always picking up the hammer.

It takes time to train and use a new tool. That applies to LLM and humans. Would you use the same drill to hang drywall and core through a concrete floor?

Object pascal is many things, obscure it is not

Probably depends on your specific company or industry

Personally I've never seen anyone use Pascal as anything other than the butt of a joke or a background slide on "how far we've come" since the 80s. Nobody even seems to remember object Pascal.

... But I'm also in a sector that routinely relies on Fortran code so ymmv

People were not laughing at Turbo Pascal or Delphi when they came out, and they dominated for many years. Delphi/Object Pascal is still taught in the schools of many countries.

There are people who want everyone to forget Delphi/Object Pascal and they wish it was dead. But what they wish for and reality are two different things. Delphi still makes money, otherwise they wouldn't sell it.

Ever heard of Mac OS and a company called Apple?

It lasted for a few years as a first-class supported language, but by the early 90s they shifted most of their focus to C++ so the system API being in Pascal became more of a legacy annoyance than anything. You got to deal with Str255 types, putting "\p" at the start of all your string literals, remembering the rules for when to pass by reference or pass by value when you call toolbox functions, etc.

The fact is that without Object Pascal, there would not exist employees to work on MPW at all, or even Apple most likely.

Maybe in some alternative universe they would have been just as successful using BCPL, but the fact C and C++ were ignored at Apple until some employees came up with MPW as side project until it was too late to turn back, speaks volumes about Apple culture.

Just as it does the way A/UX was originally designed.

Apple officially supported C for Macintosh application development even back when they were still making devs do all their work on Lisas (see http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/lisa/workshop_3.0/Lisa_Wo...), but you're right that they were a majority Pascal shop until they shifted to C++ around when System 7 came out.

It did, as userspace tooling for customers, the system was written in a mix of Assembly and Clascal, Object Pascal predecessor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clascal

Is Pascal still used on macOS today? Pascal/Delphi was relevant 20 years ago, but it isn't anymore.

Of course not, because that wasn't what I wrote.

I wrote Mac OS, which was replaced by OS X.

macOS is a rebranding from OS X.

Delphi is pretty much relevant in Germany, to this day there are conferences to attend to.

You can still get tickets for this year,

https://entwickler-konferenz.de/en/

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