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Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL (1982)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- frozenport 11y agoToday this is true for a more obvious reason; Pascal is legacy.
- eli 11y agoIt's not a very popular language, but people are still starting new projects in flavors of Pascal. Have you seen http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/?
- Johnny_Brahms 11y agoWe are actually using pascal for a very large project in healthcare (journal management). There is nothing wrong with the language, per se even though it is not the fanciest one. Our codebase is one of the cleanest I have worked with, and it compiles very fast. We are using freepascal, and even though I would not use it for my hobby projects (which I try to do mostly in scheme or factor) I would say it is one of the more pleasant languages I have worked in.
- huhtenberg 11y ago> Compilers with array bounds checking (...) stifle creativity, (...) and make it impossible to modify the operating system code with negative subscripts. Absolute classic. The words to live by.
- code_sterling 11y agoI'm going to be honest, I miss those days. Granted I used to have to wipe my machine every month at least, and things became horribly corrupt, but it was fun.
- walshemj 11y agoI know and as some one who did both Fortran for both billing systems and a CFD model of the CFR (commercial fast breeder aka a mommy bomb ) I do get the humor in ways some younger readers might not
- donatj 11y agoOne of the programs closest to my heart which I use multiple times a day, "Beyond Compare" is written in PASCAL, Delphi more specifically. I know very little about PASCAL, but I know that Beyond Compare is rock solid.
- arel 11y agoAn absolute gem of an application that not only does the job but near pefect ux.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoBeyond Compare has to be one of my all time favorite programs. I have to admit, however, that I never knew it was written in PASCAL. I think this is very cool.
- derrickdirge 11y agoI have actual nightmares about developing in Delphi. I can't believe there's a Delphi project that people speak this highly of.
- hvs 11y agoReally? Delphi was generally a pleasure to use for the couple of years that I did.
- lbruder 11y agoThe one thing Delphi really did wrong was to make GUI programming too easy. It was just too simple, too tempting, to just put all your code into your MainForm.pas, making it grow to over 10'000 LOC. If (and only if) the programmers took care to avoid code duplication and cared about writing good, solid code, Delphi rocked. Just like Lazarus (http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/) does today. One of my weapons of choice nowadays when it comes to GUI development.
- giancarlostoro 11y agoThe only thing I wish it had is more documentation for those of us who never did any Pascal. I love Lazarus too, but it's quite a lot to take in when you're used to other languages. I basically have to "Guess" how to write code, which can become a lot more work with Delphi / FreePascal.
- batrat 11y agoI did 4 years in high school.
- angrycoder 11y agoWas this written as satire back in 1982? Because it is great when read as satire. As a real thing written by a real person, not so much.
- baldfat 11y agoThis is a great sarcasm piece that seems timeless. "Real Programmers can write five-page-long DO loops without getting confused." "Real Programmers don't need comments -- the code is obvious." "If you can't do it in FORTRAN, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing." "At a funeral, the Real Programmer is the one saying ``Poor George. And he almost had the sort routine working before the coronary.''
- octetta 11y agoAlready amused by the comments based only on the title but not on the content: "Real Commenters don't read the contents".
- squidfood 11y agoOne irony is that modern Fortran is quite a nice language to work with. As long as you can just call, and don't actually have to work on, all the '77 numerical libraries that the Real Programmers put together.
- JupiterMoon 11y agoThis is true. I would still use it -- except that python is an even nicer language to work with and via numpy and scipy lots of those library are nicely wrapped.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- LukeShu 11y agoThis is the post referenced in the opening of The Story of Mel; which may also be of interest. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
- veddox 11y agoBoth are great epics of hacking history. I just wonder whether there are any more?
- moyix 11y agoSure; the 500 mile email comes to mind (it gets reposted here periodically): http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
- LukeShu 11y agoAnother one is the Unix Recovery Legend: (also posted here periodically) http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/hack/recovery.html http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/hack/recovery.html It's also included in the Unix Administration Horror Stories, which was posted here recently-ish. But it's more just tails of people screwing up in creative ways. http://www.yak.net/carmen/unix_horror_stories http://www.yak.net/carmen/unix_horror_stories
- veddox 11y agoTrue, those are also good ones. Although I have to say the story of Mel is still my favourite :-)
- function_seven 11y agoI love The Black Team: http://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/TheBlackTeam.html http://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/TheBlackTeam.html
- bcrescimanno 11y agoI immediately thought of Bret Victor's wonderful talk on, 'The Future of Programming' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4
- nijiko 11y ago>thcught you almost got me c, you almost, got me.
- drostie 11y agoRelated: Real Men Don't Play GURPS: http://www.zipworld.com.au/~hong/dnd/realmen.htm http://www.zipworld.com.au/~hong/dnd/realmen.htm (slight trigger warning: the "Real Men use swords to..." list ends on a line which can be read as quite rapey, though I don't think it was intended that way.) (Note: it is a Windows-1292 document, correctly identified that way by a <meta> tag, which is incorrectly given a UTF-8 charset by a Content Type header. Therefore if the weird symbols are too distracting, you can save it to the hard drive and load it into a browser from there, and the symbols will resolve properly.) It is worth reading for the line, "If you can't do it with a sword, do it with a fireball. If you can't do it with a fireball, it isn't worth doing."
- peterwwillis 11y agoI am outraged by all this quiche-shaming.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoIt's a cheese-and-egg pie, what's not to love about quiche?
- JupiterMoon 11y agoOften cooked with ham. I mean it's basically an improved omelette...
- adolgert 11y ago"Eating quiche" used to be slang for a sexual act. It's when the joke is most funny that we need to recognize mechanisms of exclusion.
- etjossem 11y agoThe reference is pretty clearly to "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche" (1982), which was itself a satire of exclusionary masculinity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Men_Don%27t_Eat_Quiche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Men_Don%27t_Eat_Quiche
- aflinik 11y agoAlthough it's meant to be sarcastic, I believe it nicely exposes typical things developers used to argue about back then, not that different from modern arguments about JS vs compiled-to-js, elixir vs erlang, GC vs manual memory management, etc. Anybody knows some more serious piece from those times that would show the actual arguments of, say, PASCAL opponents?
- Jtsummers 11y agohttp://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pascal.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pasc... By Brian Kernighan This was written in 1981, so a lot changed after he wrote this.
- mariuz 11y agoHe describes an old pascal dialect http://wiki.freepascal.org/Why_Pascal_is_Not_My_Favorite_Programming_Language http://wiki.freepascal.org/Why_Pascal_is_Not_My_Favorite_Pro...
- Gibbon1 11y agoI'll give you an argument, PASCAL was ... ... ... ... ... slow Academics were big kahunas with unrestricted accounts on mainframes, everyone else got tiny tiny slices of time. How tiny? A trash 80 gave you more processing power than an student account on the VAX. Academics thought PASCAL was the bees knees. Everyone else could see it was unusable for practical work.
- jhallenworld 11y agoReal programmers should definitely try to use TECO. It can be described as a screen editor, but with no screen. Instead you need a good imagination.
- leni536 11y agoIf anybody wants to try: https://github.com/blakemcbride/TECOC https://github.com/blakemcbride/TECOC
- nickysielicki 11y agoI'm surprised how well the letter 'o' looks as a bullet point.