4 ms·

Is this some inside joke that I am not getting? C# is nothing like Pascal. Java is the language closest to C#.

SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
One person, Anders Hejlsberg, was a leading architect on Delphi and then on C# His work on C# is widely thought to be a continuation of his work on Delphi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg
- mhd 6y ago
  There's also plenty of other cross-pollination, e.g. the influence that Cedar or even Modula-3 had on Java. Still, I can understand the issues. Let's not forget that despite his work in the field, Hejlsberg isn't Mr. Pascal, that would be Niklaus Wirth. Who always had a way more minimalistic design perspective than others, starting with Algol-W and ending with Oberon-7. Comparing that to the kitchen sink approach of C# (and arguably even Object Pascal) shows two philosophies that can hardly be more different.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
    I think that Delphi took a bit of a "kitchen sink" approach when compared to classic Pascal, for practical reasons of being most useful to a working programmer, rather than being academic. Specifically the infamous yet influential essay "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language" has a laundry list of reasons why academic Pascal is hard to use "for serious programming", and many of them have been corrected in Delphi.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Many of them were already corrected in ISO Extended Pascal, UCSD Pascal and Apple's Object Pascal, before Borland happened.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    > the kitchen sink approach of C# (and arguably even Object Pascal) When Free Pascal is concerned there is no argument here... consider that the compiler has a special language "submode" that enables syntax just for interfacing with Cocoa/Objective-C objects (...or even the whole idea behind having different language modes and submodes in the first place - that is totally antithetical to Wirth's ideas, but in practice it is very useful).
  - open-source-ux 6y ago
    I also prefer the minimalist approach to language design and even though I like Pascal, the modern incarnation of the language in FreePascal is simply too large. I feel the same about many popular languages. Perhaps it's inevitable as developers demand more features and the language accrues more features with each release. Even languages that start small(ish) over time grow to be quite large (e.g. Python).
    - SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
      > I also prefer the minimalist approach to language design and even though I like Pascal, the modern incarnation of the language in FreePascal is simply too large. Then don't look at c# version 9. There's an expressive and modern (immutable and null safe by default) language somewhere in there struggling under the weight of previous syntax and semantics.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  His work on C# was a continuation on his work on J++ actually.

One person, Anders Hejlsberg, was a leading architect on Delphi and then on C# His work on C# is widely thought to be a continuation of his work on Delphi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg

mhd 6y ago
There's also plenty of other cross-pollination, e.g. the influence that Cedar or even Modula-3 had on Java. Still, I can understand the issues. Let's not forget that despite his work in the field, Hejlsberg isn't Mr. Pascal, that would be Niklaus Wirth. Who always had a way more minimalistic design perspective than others, starting with Algol-W and ending with Oberon-7. Comparing that to the kitchen sink approach of C# (and arguably even Object Pascal) shows two philosophies that can hardly be more different.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
  I think that Delphi took a bit of a "kitchen sink" approach when compared to classic Pascal, for practical reasons of being most useful to a working programmer, rather than being academic. Specifically the infamous yet influential essay "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language" has a laundry list of reasons why academic Pascal is hard to use "for serious programming", and many of them have been corrected in Delphi.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Many of them were already corrected in ISO Extended Pascal, UCSD Pascal and Apple's Object Pascal, before Borland happened.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  > the kitchen sink approach of C# (and arguably even Object Pascal) When Free Pascal is concerned there is no argument here... consider that the compiler has a special language "submode" that enables syntax just for interfacing with Cocoa/Objective-C objects (...or even the whole idea behind having different language modes and submodes in the first place - that is totally antithetical to Wirth's ideas, but in practice it is very useful).
- open-source-ux 6y ago
  I also prefer the minimalist approach to language design and even though I like Pascal, the modern incarnation of the language in FreePascal is simply too large. I feel the same about many popular languages. Perhaps it's inevitable as developers demand more features and the language accrues more features with each release. Even languages that start small(ish) over time grow to be quite large (e.g. Python).
  - SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
    > I also prefer the minimalist approach to language design and even though I like Pascal, the modern incarnation of the language in FreePascal is simply too large. Then don't look at c# version 9. There's an expressive and modern (immutable and null safe by default) language somewhere in there struggling under the weight of previous syntax and semantics.
pjmlp 6y ago
His work on C# was a continuation on his work on J++ actually.