4 ms·

Pascal? The author must hate himself.

jacquesm 1y ago
How come? Pascal is a perfectly good language, it wouldn't be my first choice for anything but compared to quite a few other languages from that era it got lots of things right.
- jll29 1y ago
  There have always been fanboy "camps" feuding each other, from "What's the best programming language?" to the never-ending "What's the best text editor?". Brian Kernighan tried to port his famous software tools (the code to go with the likewise famous book) to Pascal and failed, which led to a write-up, in which he identified 9 shortcomings of Pascal that C doesn't have. https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pascal.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pas... But needless to say, there exist also many strenghs of Pascal over C, which he does not address. I find his claim that Pascal is only a toy language in which serious software can be written unprofessional and empirically untrue: for over a decade, PC software development in Pascal was thriving thanks to TurboPascal. Now admittedly that is not standard ISO Pascal, but at the same time, it is a well-known fact that it existed, and that it fixed some of the criticisms of Kernighan's paper, so it is regrettable he still elected to use such strongly negative language regardless. (And for the record, his paper was written 1981, when Pascal's successor Modula-2 was already available.) I like C and Pascal, each in their own way, but Pascal is arguably much more readable, and perhaps it is fair to say many Pascal programmers were comfortable in the language and would not have bothered to learn/struggle with C.
  - stonogo 1y ago
    I find the claim that bwk 'failed' suspect, since I have a copy of "Software Tools in Pascal" on my shelf right now. Almost the entirety of his criticisms were accurate in 1981 and addressed even five years later, and many of them say more about his assumptions than they do about Pascal. For instance, the implicit assumption that arrays must be the natural way to deal with strings rings hollow; some years later, "I wish it were as easy to deal with strings in C as it is in Pascal" would be a common refrain. I think bwk is one of the best people in the industry, both technically and personally, but I feel this essay is an artifact of its time more than a lasting commentary on Pascal as a whole.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Not quite, because by 1981, the right approach would have been to use Modula-2, where his complaints were no longer relevant.
      - stonogo 1y ago
        If bwk set out to write "Software Tools in Pascal" and decided to use Modula-2, that would have been failure. I get that you like Modula-2, but this essay and that book aren't about them.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Had we bothered with Modula-2, released in 1978, where Niklaus Wirth took care to fix all ISO Pascal issues from 1976, we would not have such problems. Also he has a pretty much dual approach to his criticism, while having Pascal dialects is a flaw, apparently having C dialects is a plus.

How come? Pascal is a perfectly good language, it wouldn't be my first choice for anything but compared to quite a few other languages from that era it got lots of things right.

jll29 1y ago
There have always been fanboy "camps" feuding each other, from "What's the best programming language?" to the never-ending "What's the best text editor?". Brian Kernighan tried to port his famous software tools (the code to go with the likewise famous book) to Pascal and failed, which led to a write-up, in which he identified 9 shortcomings of Pascal that C doesn't have. https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pascal.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pas... But needless to say, there exist also many strenghs of Pascal over C, which he does not address. I find his claim that Pascal is only a toy language in which serious software can be written unprofessional and empirically untrue: for over a decade, PC software development in Pascal was thriving thanks to TurboPascal. Now admittedly that is not standard ISO Pascal, but at the same time, it is a well-known fact that it existed, and that it fixed some of the criticisms of Kernighan's paper, so it is regrettable he still elected to use such strongly negative language regardless. (And for the record, his paper was written 1981, when Pascal's successor Modula-2 was already available.) I like C and Pascal, each in their own way, but Pascal is arguably much more readable, and perhaps it is fair to say many Pascal programmers were comfortable in the language and would not have bothered to learn/struggle with C.
- stonogo 1y ago
  I find the claim that bwk 'failed' suspect, since I have a copy of "Software Tools in Pascal" on my shelf right now. Almost the entirety of his criticisms were accurate in 1981 and addressed even five years later, and many of them say more about his assumptions than they do about Pascal. For instance, the implicit assumption that arrays must be the natural way to deal with strings rings hollow; some years later, "I wish it were as easy to deal with strings in C as it is in Pascal" would be a common refrain. I think bwk is one of the best people in the industry, both technically and personally, but I feel this essay is an artifact of its time more than a lasting commentary on Pascal as a whole.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Not quite, because by 1981, the right approach would have been to use Modula-2, where his complaints were no longer relevant.
    - stonogo 1y ago
      If bwk set out to write "Software Tools in Pascal" and decided to use Modula-2, that would have been failure. I get that you like Modula-2, but this essay and that book aren't about them.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Had we bothered with Modula-2, released in 1978, where Niklaus Wirth took care to fix all ISO Pascal issues from 1976, we would not have such problems. Also he has a pretty much dual approach to his criticism, while having Pascal dialects is a flaw, apparently having C dialects is a plus.