4 ms·

>The structure of Pascal seemed to be inherently geared towards teaching fairly disciplined programming. Maybe that was the point. I think that Pascal has helpe

by tsotha 12y ago

>The structure of Pascal seemed to be inherently geared towards teaching fairly disciplined programming. Maybe that was the point. I think that Pascal has helped me be a better programmer. Niklaus Wirth would be pleased to hear that, since he designed Pascal to be a teaching language. He intended students to learn on Pascal and then graduate to Modula-2 for serious projects. I don't think Modula-2 ever really caught on, though.

anta40 12y ago
>> I don't think Modula-2 ever really caught on, though. Oberon too. I wonder why Pascal (Object Pascal, to be precise) get most of the spotlight.
- vidarh 12y ago
  Pascal had a commercial ecosystem by the time Oberon came along. And Oberon is austere where Pascal dialects grew all kinds of warts in the process of adding the features people asked for. Wirth took away features in almost every iteration of developing his languages - you see this in almost every language he touched going back to the 60's and Algol-W. It's been the guiding principle of most of his career to ruthlessly simplify. The Oberon-07 language report is 17 pages. Oberon takes more of an effort in following Wirth's mindset of addressing deficiencies by looking at how to make things simpler across the board (e.g. including for compiler writers) as opposed to the Pascal dialects which took the approach of addressing deficiencies by making things immediately easier for users to pick up, at the cost of additional complexity all over the place.
  - peterfirefly 12y ago
    The CDC-6600 Pascal compiler from ETH had several small extensions in the same style as Turbo Pascal to integrate better with the underlying platform. This is just to say that the culture of extensions/escape hatches didn't begin with Turbo Pascal.
bhaak 12y ago
FWIW, Modula-2 and Oberon had quite a following on the Amiga back in the day. There were whole Public Domain disk collections that only consisted of programs done in those languages. Most notably the AMOK disks (Amiga Modula-2 and Oberon Klub). I think those languages also didn't catch on was partly because they weren't part of any major OS development standard. On Unix or Linux, C was dominant, for historical and cultural reasons, and on Windows, although there was and is a small but vocal Pascal community, most developers are focused on Microsoft's own programming languages.
hsitz 12y ago
"Niklaus Wirth would be pleased to hear that . . . He intended students to learn on Pascal and then graduate to Modula-2 for serious projects." Well, maybe later on. He designed Pascal in late 1960's and Modula-2 in late 1970's.

by tsotha 12y ago

anta40 12y ago

>> I don't think Modula-2 ever really caught on, though. Oberon too. I wonder why Pascal (Object Pascal, to be precise) get most of the spotlight.

vidarh 12y ago
Pascal had a commercial ecosystem by the time Oberon came along. And Oberon is austere where Pascal dialects grew all kinds of warts in the process of adding the features people asked for. Wirth took away features in almost every iteration of developing his languages - you see this in almost every language he touched going back to the 60's and Algol-W. It's been the guiding principle of most of his career to ruthlessly simplify. The Oberon-07 language report is 17 pages. Oberon takes more of an effort in following Wirth's mindset of addressing deficiencies by looking at how to make things simpler across the board (e.g. including for compiler writers) as opposed to the Pascal dialects which took the approach of addressing deficiencies by making things immediately easier for users to pick up, at the cost of additional complexity all over the place.
- peterfirefly 12y ago
  The CDC-6600 Pascal compiler from ETH had several small extensions in the same style as Turbo Pascal to integrate better with the underlying platform. This is just to say that the culture of extensions/escape hatches didn't begin with Turbo Pascal.

bhaak 12y ago

FWIW, Modula-2 and Oberon had quite a following on the Amiga back in the day. There were whole Public Domain disk collections that only consisted of programs done in those languages. Most notably the AMOK disks (Amiga Modula-2 and Oberon Klub). I think those languages also didn't catch on was partly because they weren't part of any major OS development standard. On Unix or Linux, C was dominant, for historical and cultural reasons, and on Windows, although there was and is a small but vocal Pascal community, most developers are focused on Microsoft's own programming languages.

hsitz 12y ago

"Niklaus Wirth would be pleased to hear that . . . He intended students to learn on Pascal and then graduate to Modula-2 for serious projects." Well, maybe later on. He designed Pascal in late 1960's and Modula-2 in late 1970's.