4 ms·

Wonder why Modula-2 never go mainstream? I see it has some nice features like concurrency.

by anta40 4y ago

mhd 4y ago
Bad timing, basically. By the time Modula-2 appeared, Pascal was rather popular, and there were a lot of extensions to the official standard that mirrored the main features of Modula-2. I think it was UCSD Pascal that introduced "Units", and that was quickly taken up by other popular compilers. Also, by that time OOP started to rear its seven heads, and Modula-2 didn't have an answer to that, whereas yet another Pascal extensions (e.g. by Apple or Borland) filled that role. ISO Pascal and late Turbo Pascal/Delphi are about as far apart as they're to Modula-2, but you still had the name and quite often transitioned by compiler release, not language standard. Modula-3 and Oberon answered the OOP call, but the former wasn't officially Wirthian and the latter probably too minimalist and non-industrial. Also, of course, the BCPL language family enjoyed a steady rise during that time, first C eating into the Pascal space and then C++ becoming the standard low-level OO language.
zokier 4y ago
Probably is related to the fact that UNIX and Windows were intrisically C systems. While obviously you could program Modula-2 on both, it was a second-class citizen
- pjmlp 4y ago
  On Windows, Turbo Pascal for Windows, followed by Delphi, were everywhere, in similar scale to Visual Basic. But then Borland decided to go after enterprise market, and they never recovered from the damage. Their products are still strong among the German market, though. https://entwickler-konferenz.de https://entwickler-konferenz.de
- anta40 4y ago
  I'm not old enough to experience UNIX in mid 80/90s. By reading various stories and hear some anecdotes, seems that UNIX is a nice bandwagon for C. Except classic MacOS, Pascal wasn't that popular for system programming. The culture still survive until today. Try searching at OSDev forum or Github, and you'll see most kernel projects are done in C.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Wonder why Modula-2 never go mainstream? I see it has some nice features like concurrency.

by anta40 4y ago

Wonder why Modula-2 never go mainstream? I see it has some nice features like concurrency.

mhd 4y ago

Bad timing, basically. By the time Modula-2 appeared, Pascal was rather popular, and there were a lot of extensions to the official standard that mirrored the main features of Modula-2. I think it was UCSD Pascal that introduced "Units", and that was quickly taken up by other popular compilers. Also, by that time OOP started to rear its seven heads, and Modula-2 didn't have an answer to that, whereas yet another Pascal extensions (e.g. by Apple or Borland) filled that role. ISO Pascal and late Turbo Pascal/Delphi are about as far apart as they're to Modula-2, but you still had the name and quite often transitioned by compiler release, not language standard. Modula-3 and Oberon answered the OOP call, but the former wasn't officially Wirthian and the latter probably too minimalist and non-industrial. Also, of course, the BCPL language family enjoyed a steady rise during that time, first C eating into the Pascal space and then C++ becoming the standard low-level OO language.

zokier 4y ago

Probably is related to the fact that UNIX and Windows were intrisically C systems. While obviously you could program Modula-2 on both, it was a second-class citizen

pjmlp 4y ago
On Windows, Turbo Pascal for Windows, followed by Delphi, were everywhere, in similar scale to Visual Basic. But then Borland decided to go after enterprise market, and they never recovered from the damage. Their products are still strong among the German market, though. https://entwickler-konferenz.de https://entwickler-konferenz.de
anta40 4y ago
I'm not old enough to experience UNIX in mid 80/90s. By reading various stories and hear some anecdotes, seems that UNIX is a nice bandwagon for C. Except classic MacOS, Pascal wasn't that popular for system programming. The culture still survive until today. Try searching at OSDev forum or Github, and you'll see most kernel projects are done in C.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]