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I was teaching programming with Pascal until three years ago, and I think the pedagogical argument might have made sense in the past, but not in 2023 (or 10 yea

I was teaching programming with Pascal until three years ago, and I think the pedagogical argument might have made sense in the past, but not in 2023 (or 10 years ago for that matter). The syntax is rigid in all the wrong places. For example, not being able to declare variables anywhere doesn't really help students, this isn't something that typically leads them to errors. What does lead to lots of errors? Dereferencing uninitialized pointers or going out of bounds in arrays, for example. And the language and compiler won't help you one bit there. Same opaque segmentation faults as with C, same unpredictable behavior as with C, but with worse tooling for debugging. Compilation time is not an issue in 2023 - well, maybe it is if you compare with C++, but C++ is about the worst non-joke language I can think of for learning (and it was my first language!). C, Java, Python, etc. are fast enough. Pascal had its time but I don't think there is much reason to use it now, outside of pure curiosity or wanting to try a historical language.

slt2021 3y ago
>For example, not being able to declare variables anywhere doesn't really help students, this Disagree. Creating variables in the middle is the reason why beginners create spaghetti code and mix up control flow. This is the reason for dangling pointers, memory leaks, and de-referencing pointers in wrong places. If student needs to declare variable in the middle of method, this is a good sign to split the method or rethink control flow. What really I learned from Pascal is managing clean control flow, and var section in the beginning forces you to think in advance what you are going to need in this particular method vs what needs to be done in a separate function.
anta40 3y ago
>> Pascal had its time but I don't think there is much reason to use it now, outside of pure curiosity or wanting to try a historical language. I use Pascal only for side job/hobby, not for daily work. Lazarus+FPC is still my #1 choice for desktop app (is this still a "thing" in 2023?). No Electron, no JVM etc etc. For writing web/server/backend stuffs, kinda hard to argue with Go.

slt2021 3y ago

>For example, not being able to declare variables anywhere doesn't really help students, this Disagree. Creating variables in the middle is the reason why beginners create spaghetti code and mix up control flow. This is the reason for dangling pointers, memory leaks, and de-referencing pointers in wrong places. If student needs to declare variable in the middle of method, this is a good sign to split the method or rethink control flow. What really I learned from Pascal is managing clean control flow, and var section in the beginning forces you to think in advance what you are going to need in this particular method vs what needs to be done in a separate function.

anta40 3y ago

>> Pascal had its time but I don't think there is much reason to use it now, outside of pure curiosity or wanting to try a historical language. I use Pascal only for side job/hobby, not for daily work. Lazarus+FPC is still my #1 choice for desktop app (is this still a "thing" in 2023?). No Electron, no JVM etc etc. For writing web/server/backend stuffs, kinda hard to argue with Go.