19 ms·

What I miss is Pascal. Delphi and other drag & drop RAD tools are easy, not simple.

hjahre 10y ago
What about Lazarus [http://www.lazarus-ide.org http://www.lazarus-ide.org] or Free Pascal [http://www.freepascal.org http://www.freepascal.org]?
- TurboHaskal 10y ago
  It's pretty cool.
dozzie 10y ago
I never understood why would anybody choose Pascal over Ada when talking about languages alone.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Because Ada compilers used to be targeted to the military, aviation and corporations with big pockets. Only in the last decade we saw the language getting an usable open source version thanks to the work of Ada Core and their contributions to GNAT. All other surviving Ada compilers are commercial, following the same price practices as usual. So many of us in the Pascal golden days were only able to buy Pascal compilers. Just to put this in perspective, Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5, the last TP version before Delphi was created, would be around 100 € on today's money. An Ada compiler would be at very least 5K €. Also despite the famous "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language" assay from Brian Kernighan, the majority of Pascal compilers supported the UCSD, Apple and Borland extensions, so the actual Pascal dialect used by most of us was quite close to Ada83 in terms of features (minus generics). In 2017, given the existance of GNAT, SPARK and updated Ada standards, Ada would be probably a better option.
  - candiodari 10y ago
    This is one aspect of why the DOS/Windows ecosystem swamped away the old software industry. People who worked before windows don't seem to grasp this simple fact. Tons of variations : Why wasn't UNIX used ? Why did dBase beat all the minicomputer and mainframe solutions ? Why weren't the free C compilers used by hobbyist programmers ? Why did nobody run X11 ? The answer is this : because doing that cost unreasonable amounts of money. Either they did so directly, or because necessary hardware cost boatloads. And that happened because of 2 effects : either because it only ran on one kind of architecture that was really, really expensive, or because it required ridiculous amounts of resources.

What about Lazarus [http://www.lazarus-ide.org http://www.lazarus-ide.org] or Free Pascal [http://www.freepascal.org http://www.freepascal.org]?

TurboHaskal 10y ago
It's pretty cool.

dozzie 10y ago

I never understood why would anybody choose Pascal over Ada when talking about languages alone.

pjmlp 10y ago
Because Ada compilers used to be targeted to the military, aviation and corporations with big pockets. Only in the last decade we saw the language getting an usable open source version thanks to the work of Ada Core and their contributions to GNAT. All other surviving Ada compilers are commercial, following the same price practices as usual. So many of us in the Pascal golden days were only able to buy Pascal compilers. Just to put this in perspective, Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5, the last TP version before Delphi was created, would be around 100 € on today's money. An Ada compiler would be at very least 5K €. Also despite the famous "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language" assay from Brian Kernighan, the majority of Pascal compilers supported the UCSD, Apple and Borland extensions, so the actual Pascal dialect used by most of us was quite close to Ada83 in terms of features (minus generics). In 2017, given the existance of GNAT, SPARK and updated Ada standards, Ada would be probably a better option.
- candiodari 10y ago
  This is one aspect of why the DOS/Windows ecosystem swamped away the old software industry. People who worked before windows don't seem to grasp this simple fact. Tons of variations : Why wasn't UNIX used ? Why did dBase beat all the minicomputer and mainframe solutions ? Why weren't the free C compilers used by hobbyist programmers ? Why did nobody run X11 ? The answer is this : because doing that cost unreasonable amounts of money. Either they did so directly, or because necessary hardware cost boatloads. And that happened because of 2 effects : either because it only ran on one kind of architecture that was really, really expensive, or because it required ridiculous amounts of resources.