4 ms·

Pascal - still use it today. I started with Turbo Pascal 3.0, went through several versions of Borland Pascal (DOS and Windows), several versions of Delphi, an

by deusu 11y ago

Pascal - still use it today. I started with Turbo Pascal 3.0, went through several versions of Borland Pascal (DOS and Windows), several versions of Delphi, and am now using FreePascal. I do most of my work on Linux nowadays. Pascal still gets everything done and after 20+ years I am really fluent in it. Did a little bit of Javascript with Node.js, also looked at Golang. While I did like some aspects of them, there was always the downside of having to learn a whole new ecosystem. Didn't like the dynamic typing of Javascript. Golang looked better for what I do. But in the end I just wrote a small Pascal library to emulate Golang's channels which I really liked, and that was the end of Golang for me. My main project in Pascal is a search-engine: https://deusu.org https://deusu.org Sourcecode for that is on GitHub: https://github.com/MichaelSchoebel/DeuSu https://github.com/MichaelSchoebel/DeuSu So yes, you can (still) do actual stuff in Pascal. Even pretty cutting-edge stuff.

simonswords82 11y ago
Holy cow! I used Pascal at college about 16 years ago. I never thought I would see it used in the wild, especially in 2016. Nicely done!
- inetsee 11y ago
  I taught Pascal at college about 40 years ago.
- clouddrover 11y ago
  Some other in the wild examples, the WHATWG has a tool called Wattsi that's written in Object Pascal: https://github.com/whatwg/wattsi https://github.com/whatwg/wattsi Interesting blog post from last year on someone's experiences developing an application in Object Pascal: http://ziotom78.blogspot.com/2015/01/lfi-data-analysis-with-fpc.html http://ziotom78.blogspot.com/2015/01/lfi-data-analysis-with-... Free Pascal itself: http://www.freepascal.org/ http://www.freepascal.org/
gtirloni 11y ago
Pretty cool! Ever tried Modula-2 or -3?
- deusu 11y ago
  Did some baby steps in Modula-2 out of curiosity about 20 years back. The IDE and compiler were horrible compared to Turbo Pascal, so I went right back to that.
Hixie 11y ago
The HTML spec's preprocessor is written in FreePascal: https://github.com/whatwg/wattsi https://github.com/whatwg/wattsi
i336_ 11y ago
This is pretty awesome, and the speed is great. I really like obscure search engines, because their (comparatively :P) tiny indexes mean they'll return significantly different data to what say Google or Bing would return. If there's one thing I would definitely vote for with projects like this, it would be... an API. In a world where virtually every search engine is built around the idea of controlled, non-open access, a predictable, documented, free-access API would be a breath of fresh air, and you'd get people seriously interested in this even though it's small. (You'd definitely need rate limiting though because there are always the hangers-on with the low IQs. >.>) You may (or may not, no idea) also be interested in the Common Crawl corpus - http://commoncrawl.org/the-data/get-started/ http://commoncrawl.org/the-data/get-started/ - which contains a few PB of data collected over the past few years (sorted by date). Access via HTTP is only moderately involved: read the line immediately above "Data Format." Of potentially much less interest is a 2012 80TB snapshot Archive.org are (or at least were) offering; they seeded their indexer off the Alexa top 1m and boxed up whatever came back. https://blog.archive.org/2012/10/26/80-terabytes-of-archived-web-crawl-data-available-for-research/ https://blog.archive.org/2012/10/26/80-terabytes-of-archived... It's apparently only available on request (I expect a search engine would definitely qualify, especially considering the data is 4 years old now - although I definitely want to see what's in it if you do decide to chase this - serious :P). Finally, search for "cheetah project" - the 2nd top-level result is messed up, apparently the Chinese (Unicode) got scrambled. Just a note; you may already be aware.
- deusu 11y ago
  Non-ASCII characters are indeed messed up. I wrote the HTML parser about 15 years ago. Back then my programming style was so bad, that I'm afraid nothing short of a complete rewrite of the parser will be able to fix it. The Archive.org crawl is way too old to be of any use. And the Common Crawl corpus is only marginally bigger than what I crawl myself. There are currently just over a billion pages in my search-index and I can recrawl those about every 45 days. Crawling right now at about 650 URLs/s and 200mbit/s. Only about 60% of URLs crawled end up in the index. The rest are errors, timeouts, redirections, etc. I have been thinking about adding an API. Rate-limiting is a must as you have correctly said. I'm already in a constant fight against SEOs who try to scrape the search-results and who apparently don't see anything wrong in making 10+ queries/second. The API would definitly not be a free-for-all, but sort of like "send me an email and describe what you want to do with it, and if I like it I'll give you an API-key".Together with a primer on what not to do of course. :) If people do more than a certain amount of queries/month, then it would also have to be paid.

by deusu 11y ago

simonswords82 11y ago

Holy cow! I used Pascal at college about 16 years ago. I never thought I would see it used in the wild, especially in 2016. Nicely done!

inetsee 11y ago
I taught Pascal at college about 40 years ago.
clouddrover 11y ago
Some other in the wild examples, the WHATWG has a tool called Wattsi that's written in Object Pascal: https://github.com/whatwg/wattsi https://github.com/whatwg/wattsi Interesting blog post from last year on someone's experiences developing an application in Object Pascal: http://ziotom78.blogspot.com/2015/01/lfi-data-analysis-with-fpc.html http://ziotom78.blogspot.com/2015/01/lfi-data-analysis-with-... Free Pascal itself: http://www.freepascal.org/ http://www.freepascal.org/

gtirloni 11y ago

Pretty cool! Ever tried Modula-2 or -3?

deusu 11y ago
Did some baby steps in Modula-2 out of curiosity about 20 years back. The IDE and compiler were horrible compared to Turbo Pascal, so I went right back to that.

Hixie 11y ago

The HTML spec's preprocessor is written in FreePascal: https://github.com/whatwg/wattsi https://github.com/whatwg/wattsi

i336_ 11y ago

This is pretty awesome, and the speed is great. I really like obscure search engines, because their (comparatively :P) tiny indexes mean they'll return significantly different data to what say Google or Bing would return. If there's one thing I would definitely vote for with projects like this, it would be... an API. In a world where virtually every search engine is built around the idea of controlled, non-open access, a predictable, documented, free-access API would be a breath of fresh air, and you'd get people seriously interested in this even though it's small. (You'd definitely need rate limiting though because there are always the hangers-on with the low IQs. >.>) You may (or may not, no idea) also be interested in the Common Crawl corpus - http://commoncrawl.org/the-data/get-started/ http://commoncrawl.org/the-data/get-started/ - which contains a few PB of data collected over the past few years (sorted by date). Access via HTTP is only moderately involved: read the line immediately above "Data Format." Of potentially much less interest is a 2012 80TB snapshot Archive.org are (or at least were) offering; they seeded their indexer off the Alexa top 1m and boxed up whatever came back. https://blog.archive.org/2012/10/26/80-terabytes-of-archived-web-crawl-data-available-for-research/ https://blog.archive.org/2012/10/26/80-terabytes-of-archived... It's apparently only available on request (I expect a search engine would definitely qualify, especially considering the data is 4 years old now - although I definitely want to see what's in it if you do decide to chase this - serious :P). Finally, search for "cheetah project" - the 2nd top-level result is messed up, apparently the Chinese (Unicode) got scrambled. Just a note; you may already be aware.

deusu 11y ago
Non-ASCII characters are indeed messed up. I wrote the HTML parser about 15 years ago. Back then my programming style was so bad, that I'm afraid nothing short of a complete rewrite of the parser will be able to fix it. The Archive.org crawl is way too old to be of any use. And the Common Crawl corpus is only marginally bigger than what I crawl myself. There are currently just over a billion pages in my search-index and I can recrawl those about every 45 days. Crawling right now at about 650 URLs/s and 200mbit/s. Only about 60% of URLs crawled end up in the index. The rest are errors, timeouts, redirections, etc. I have been thinking about adding an API. Rate-limiting is a must as you have correctly said. I'm already in a constant fight against SEOs who try to scrape the search-results and who apparently don't see anything wrong in making 10+ queries/second. The API would definitly not be a free-for-all, but sort of like "send me an email and describe what you want to do with it, and if I like it I'll give you an API-key".Together with a primer on what not to do of course. :) If people do more than a certain amount of queries/month, then it would also have to be paid.