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As a student I learned Turbo Pascal around 1991. Most of the problems with the original language were fixed and Borland provided enough extensions to use the l
by fpoling 6y ago
As a student I learned Turbo Pascal around 1991. Most of the problems with the original language were fixed and Borland provided enough extensions to use the language to program hardware drivers under DOS.
Then on my first job I learned C++, again in its Borland incarnation. The slow compilation speed was a big issue. We were forced to use carefully structured precompiled headers and tried not to touch headers included in the core compilation set. And all that after very fast compilation and linking even on big projects with Turbo Pascal. There was even discussion to switch the project to Pascal to be more productive. But C++ were considered cooler and we stayed with it.
And at my current work almost 30 years later I still have to wait hours for full recompilation to finish. C++ modules that do roughly what Turbo Pascal had with its unit files are supposed to fix that, but we are still few years from using that in production.
- coldcode 6y agoI bought a copy of Turbo Pascal from the Borland booth at the West Coast Computer Fair in 1983 (or 4?). It was amazing product to use; it might be looking at so many years hence, but it still feel like no programming system ever could match the speed. While I do Swift today, I still remember how much fun it was to do Pascal almost instantly.
- cobaltoxide 6y agoEvery aspect of the system was fast. I particularly liked the lightning-fast "hypertext" online help. A single keypress would instantly bring up reference documentation for the language and libraries.
- rightbyte 6y agoWow ... once every 2nd year I try to add that basic feuture to my workflow IDEs but give up each time. The function signature is ofent not enough. Tooling has really degraded.
- badsectoracula 6y agoIt is largely because unlike Borland's products, nowadays there isn't a single source that provides everything and tools are really made up from barely (if at all) related components. In some cases where tools are made up for each other you have better integration - e.g. Free Pascal's own IDE does have online help like Turbo Pascal (though a downside is that because the help is in CHM, i.e. HTML, the formatting in the text mode IDE sometimes doesn't look that good - but the documentation is there anyway).
- musicale 6y agoTurbo Pascal (and perhaps its imitators like Think C) really seems like it was a milestone in IDE usability and responsiveness that has rarely (if at all) been exceeded or even equaled. I know CPUs are not GPUs, but it seems embarrassing that we can render beautiful, highly responsive, ray-traced games at 4K resolution and 120FPS but we still have to wait for code to compile, and code editors often feel clunky and unresponsive. I wish Xcode, Visual Studio, IntelliJ IDEA, etc. would apply the monstrous computing power we have in 2021 a bit more effectively.