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Hope your covid gets better. How does one "jump" into Pascal? I used Pascal in 1992 programming in high school on a Mac LCiii, and never really thought about i

Hope your covid gets better. How does one "jump" into Pascal? I used Pascal in 1992 programming in high school on a Mac LCiii, and never really thought about it again. Do modern compilers even exist for this language? What genuinely curious what you could possibly want you to program in Pascal let alone prefer using it for anything meaningful?

mikewarot 5y ago
>How does one "jump" into Pascal? It's not pascal that I was talking about into, it was the job market. I haven't been a full time programmer in decades. I've written quite a few things since then, but not full time. As for Pascal, I learned it back around 1985, when Turbo Pascal first came out. I followed through version 7, then into Delphi for Windows. It was at Delphi 5 that I took a non-programming job. I also tried out Borland's C++, but all the non-editable boilerplate, case sensitivity, and non-counted strings really seemed like antipatterns to productivity. A few years ago, I had used python for some small projects, and so I figured I'd try it out for a GUI project that came up. I figured in the 2 decades since I had used Delphi, things had surely gotten way better. What a disappointment. There were no open source 2-way GUI builders that offered IDE support for python. I wasted a year trying to support the project building a shim between wxBuilder and python 2.x. It worked, but was so brittle that I ultimately gave up on it. I was able to rewrite it all in Lazarus in less that two weeks of part time effort. I still think it's one of the best programming languages available, despite its failure to overtake C/C#/C++ in the market, which I blame mostly on Borland/Inprise/Embarcadero management.
GrizzlyMcGee 5y ago
It is possible to do Delphi development: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-download https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-dow... Although I personally don't know anyone that uses this and there probably isn't many jobs for this.

mikewarot 5y ago

>How does one "jump" into Pascal? It's not pascal that I was talking about into, it was the job market. I haven't been a full time programmer in decades. I've written quite a few things since then, but not full time. As for Pascal, I learned it back around 1985, when Turbo Pascal first came out. I followed through version 7, then into Delphi for Windows. It was at Delphi 5 that I took a non-programming job. I also tried out Borland's C++, but all the non-editable boilerplate, case sensitivity, and non-counted strings really seemed like antipatterns to productivity. A few years ago, I had used python for some small projects, and so I figured I'd try it out for a GUI project that came up. I figured in the 2 decades since I had used Delphi, things had surely gotten way better. What a disappointment. There were no open source 2-way GUI builders that offered IDE support for python. I wasted a year trying to support the project building a shim between wxBuilder and python 2.x. It worked, but was so brittle that I ultimately gave up on it. I was able to rewrite it all in Lazarus in less that two weeks of part time effort. I still think it's one of the best programming languages available, despite its failure to overtake C/C#/C++ in the market, which I blame mostly on Borland/Inprise/Embarcadero management.

GrizzlyMcGee 5y ago

It is possible to do Delphi development: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-download https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-dow... Although I personally don't know anyone that uses this and there probably isn't many jobs for this.