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everything was written in pascal back then, not just Photoshop. I spent years writing pascal as a professional mac developer before Lightspeed C (which became T
by buserror 8y ago
everything was written in pascal back then, not just Photoshop. I spent years writing pascal as a professional mac developer before Lightspeed C (which became THINK, then Symantec C later on) appeared... Then I never looked back.
MPW (Macintosh Programmer's workshop) was pretty awesome, if slow as hell -- Turbo Pascal was a lot better to work with -- the only issue is that it 'tokenized' your source code, so it wasn't plaint text anymore...
I still miss these 'one pass' compilers; I think it peaked with MetroWerks toolchain (which kept a Pascal plugin for a long time!) that was IMO the best compiler/linker/debugger toolset ever made.
- f055 8y agoPascal was a brilliant intro language, but Turbo Pascal IDE – at least for me – made it unbearable (yellow on blue...). It was a bliss when I switched to Visual Studio and C. However, MPW still holds one of my best programming experiences: I discovered it quite late, on an iBook, shortly before Xcode introduction. On MPW I wrote a simple cli math calculator, where you type your full equation like in a notebook – implementing an array walk with pseudo-regex. MPW was simple enough and clear enough that it was the first moment I thought I could really handle coding.
- xxs 8y ago>made it unbearable (yellow on blue...) I take you are not color blind (I never considered it bad at any rate). Also it was configurable, iirc
- f055 8y agoI actually am red-green colorblind – in the dot test, I see the dots are red and green, but I don't see the number in the picture. I just hated how TP looks.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y agoFrankly, I really miss the Turbo Debugger. The TUI mode of GDB is nowhere near the clarity of the plain old TD. There were some efforts like cgdb but that's not it either.
- bpizzi 8y agoAt work we're maintaining a rather big software written in C (not that much, <1M loc). It's a bit odd: there's no brackets at all (only BEGIN and END), and the majority of names (functions and variables) are 6 characters long. Guess what, it's was ported from Pascal. There's a '#define BEGIN {' in a header.
- olavk 8y agoDidn't editors have search-replace back then? Although I can understand this if the developers hated C and was forced to port against their will.
- bpizzi 8y agoThey were not forced, it was their choice, and the choosen editor (vs6) do have search/replace. My personal guess is that keeping those BEGIN/END was seen as a smart move.
- solarkraft 8y agoI guess they just liked the way it looked & felt? Really doesn't seem to make a difference to the development other than it feeling more familiar to Pascal devs.
- bpizzi 8y agoIt doesn't harm the development, indeed. However it does harm the developer's freedom in choosing his tools, for example Vim will try to fold regions delimited by brackets in C files. Nothing unbearable in the end.
- pix64 8y agoSo why not fix it?
- bpizzi 8y agoYou know why: some organizations are simply not meant to be fixed. People get hurt for silly reasons and one may not want to hurt the wrong people.
- coldcode 8y agoNo it wasn't. In fact most Mac apps in the 80's after 1984 were written in C. All three of ours from 85 - 94 were in C. We were early adopters of LightspeedC and then later Corewarrior. MPW was a waste of time.
- MontagFTB 8y agoI still bemoan the death of CodeWarrior as a Mac IDE.