Learn Turbo Pascal – a video series originally released on VHS | Hacker News Reader

Learn Turbo Pascal – a video series originally released on VHS

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137 pointsAlexeyBrin43 comments

I learned BASIC in high school, so I'm mentally mutilated, but with that said, my dad got me a copy of Turbo Pascal for my birthday, in the early 80s. He knew virtually nothing about computers, but had read an article in the Wall Street Journal about it. And my older brother was learning Pascal in college.

The manuals were a joy. I read them cover to cover. I think I only skipped one update, up through version 5, and was still using it long after MS-DOS was obsolete.

Today, in my rare moments of writing good code, I program like a Pascal programmer. I think you can easily do worse, but it's hard to do much better. One of the ideas that was prevalent at the time, was that as you learned programming, you should also be learning good programming practices.

I hear you, I can write BASIC in any language.

spaghetti gotoing everywhere and leaving space lines in between code if you might need to insert something later?

The good old On Error Resume Next

https://www.npmjs.com/package/on-error-resume-next

There is a love and hate relation from programmers who started from it. Hate goes from the fact different Pascals didn't manage to settle an agreement on standard. Well, there are ISO Standard Pascal and ISO Extended Pascal. But does Turbo Pascal conform to any of them? No. So do Apple Pascal, UCSD Pascal, whatever.

As much as I hate C enemies, I must admit they were for some reason better at standard. If Pascals were such religiously adopting the standard and if C was remaining as fragmented as Pascal, with "otherwise" in one dialect and "else" in another one, then Pascal could win. Probably not the Turbo Pascal as we know it. Another Pascal, standard enough Pascal.

Or maybe it should have been Modula-2. Amiga had TDI Modula-2. Don't know if TopSpeed Modula-2 and TDI Modula-2 were source compatible, but I guess far more than different Pascals.

This table is built by ex. Pascal developer that moved to Ada: https://p2ada.sourceforge.net/pascada.htm

Indeed, Ada's standard conformance is a breathe of fresh air.

But Amiga had no Ada compiler, and had Modula-2 compiler. So for the sake of good guys' winning, if time machine moves me to 80s, I would pick Modula-2 for every platform. Nowadays Ada is a choice of good guy

Borland had Turbo Modula-2.

Modula-2 is a pretty good language, and very small. It was the teaching language for my OS course in college. Then we got into Ada, and I thought it was a much more 'industrial' language; much more batteries included.

AFAIK in practice Turbo Pascal won because it was cheaper, faster and provided all the necessary tools that standard Pascal didn't - though those tools were largely inspired from UCSD Pascal and after Turbo Pascal other Pascal implementations basically replicated its syntax, so in a way Turbo Pascal became the defacto standard.

I find it kinda amusing that Free Pascal was Turbo Pascal compatible from 1997 but it only fully implemented a standard Pascal mode (the compiler supports multiple dialects) just ~10 years ago (and still doesn't support the Extended Pascal syntax).

The manuals that came with development tools used to be excellent, too. Gosh, the manuals that came with computers used to be better than many technical books on the market today.

Haha yeah, I talked my dad into getting me the Borland Turbo C++ compiler for DOS when I was 12 or so and it came with a big ol' thick book that I attempted to teach myself with X-) https://winworldpc.com/product/turbo-c/3x

The first language I used professionally, in the late 90s, was Allaire ColdFusion. I worked for a small regional ISP, doing tech support, basic sysops, and some web development (we used FrontPage, hah!). We installed ColdFusion on our server, and since no one else was really taking initiative, I took home the books that came with, as well as the disk, and just devoured the information, and in roughly a week, I "learned" the language.

I feel that's a bitter feature, mostly enabled by comparatively slow and expensive update cycles.

This is entertaining. I learned Turbo Pascal in high school.

What I like from watching it again: the aspect of structured programming.

It’s quite refreshing to see a language that doesn’t rely so much on brackets.

It even got away without syntax highlighting by using all uppercase REPEAT, BEGIN, END or capitalising function calls.

Thanks for sharing!

People tend to complain about excessive verbosity of some languages. However today with completion in every editor this should not be an issue, so why not use Pascal?

The problem with verbosity isn’t writing the boilerplate. It’s adding to the mental overhead of reading it

I'll claim without proof that if you are used to the language the mental overhead of "begin" and "end" is not bigger than for { and }.

I also learned Turbo Pascal in high school, it's quite a trip returning to that time. I'm pretty sure that was the last year they taught Pascal at that school, and after that.... Java. Well, it was the 90s, I guess.

Capitalization is ignored by the compiler. So you can call it REPEAT, repeat, rEpEaT and so on. Same for variable names, functions, etc.

Which is something that can cause annoying bugs when 2 identifiers that are "obviously" different when you see them in CamelCase are interpreted as identical by the compiler…

Turbo Pascal was the first language I learned, in high school in the mid-90s. While I've never written it professionally, it'll always be important to me.

90s high school Turbo Pascal gang represent!

That’s Zack Urlocker. He’s a real guy. I mean, not just a spokesmodel.

I worked with him at Borland in the early 90’s. He stands out for me because he’s gracious in debate. You don’t mind losing an argument to him.

Zortech produced a "Learn C++" series of videos in the 80's. They were popular and sold well. I never paid much attention, but a few years ago thought I might find them, and make them available on the internet.

I did find them, and watched some of it, but the content was not worth preserving.

Turbo Pascal was my first IDE, and it was pretty nice for the time. Learning all the hotkeys and the immediacy of the interface was top notch. Help files were extremely well written which made getting back to writing code very fast.

This is just lovely. I wish modern languages came with an introductory video like this, though I feel the programming world's got complex enough that 2 hours might be barely enough just to cover the build system.

Well, a youtube search for "typescript" returns about 13 trillion videos, does that count?

I remember seeing the Mix C video courses in computer shopper magazine

http://www.mixsoftware.com/product/cvideo.htm

Would be great if they can release it on YT fully. I doubt anyone buys it today since it is so dated, but would be interesting from a historical perspective.

I loved Mix/Power C. That's how I learned C on DOS in the late 1980s. Mix also had a neat set of DOS tools that simulated UNIX on DOS -- no multitasking, but you got a Bourne-like shell and various utilities like grep and sed -- and the source code to them!

http://www.mixsoftware.com/product/utility.htm

(it's funny that their store's still up; I wonder if anyone buys from them in 2025)

I learned C on PowerC that I got in a bundle that also included a C Primer from the Waite group. The primer came with a DOS-based C course with interactive quizzes. It was a fantastic combo.

Oh... And my powerC edition included the full source code of their standard C library!

I went to a Borland product announcement show that was a few hours away and won the grand prize at the raffle at the end, one copy of every Borland product. Unfortunately I already had most of them, either from work (my High School job was programming commercial software) or personally, because my hobby was programming languages.

Wish I had saved my VHS C++ Tutorials from 1990 with Bjarne Stroustrup. It was mostly him staring into the camera teaching C++. They don't appear to be on his homepage either. Bummer, because this was back before C++ went crazy, and they were a great intro to the "simpler" days.

have you tried to reach out to him?

Im pretty sure he is willingly sharing it, if there is no copyright issue or similar

I feel old - remember watching this when i started out, later went on to use Delphi before moving to the web.

Turbo Pascal was such an amazing product for its time. Those of young ones may not realize how horrible life was before Borland nailed IDEs - especially on home systems which didn’t exactly have advanced terminal capabilities.

I learned Turbo Pascal in high school (early 2000), once in college I had to learn java yikes.

I remember when I learned Java after TP. I went to team's Java go for guy and asked "how do I declare a global variable?". His response of "there is no such thing, everything is a class" was the start of my hatred towards Java. It only grew from there :)

Im wondering:

NObody seems to remember the superhigh speed of the compiler? :))

It was lightspeed compared to GCP++ or BC++

Though: I have to admit - GCP brought 32bit protected mode via CWSDPMI, which was a clear killer.

I recall rebuilding an application with about 200,000 lines of Delphi Pascal code in about 2005. Took 2-3 seconds to compile and link, I think.

My first language!

I'm not old enough to know if this is real footage.

Write in C, write in C

Write in C, oh, write in C

PASCAL won't quite cut it

Write in C

was searching for a rolling pin and tore apart my closets came across a box of like 20 books i havent looked at since before chatgpt

had this sad moment when i realized i could probably toss all of the books on programming

and this sinking feeling that i dont know how anyone ever sits down to learn this shit ever again

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