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In my opinion Go is the most Pascal like language that exists today due to fast compilation speed and extremely opinionated pursuit of oversimplifying the langu

by densh 2y ago

In my opinion Go is the most Pascal like language that exists today due to fast compilation speed and extremely opinionated pursuit of oversimplifying the language at the detriment of usability.

akira2501 2y ago
> extremely opinionated pursuit of oversimplifying the language at the detriment of usability. Subjective usability. Objectively, the language is quite usable, and many people even prefer it over the many other choices otherwise available to them.
- bitwize 2y ago
  Go has the nice quality (shared with Pascal) that it pretty much sticks to being a set of computer instructions, which means when you read Go it's easy to understand more or less exactly what the computer is doing. Great for auditing. Not so great for building large systems as abstractions over types.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    "Not so great for building large systems that are hard to audit due to the level of type abstraction they have access to." I'll give you that the lack of extensibility is sometimes a unique frustration among programming languages, but this design choice was intentional, and you've incidentally highlighted that, I think.
butterisgood 2y ago
If it’s not usable, why is there so much useful software written in Go? I haven’t had a lot of trouble writing some interesting things in Go that I’ve found difficult to redo in C++ with similar simplicity. Sometimes a language doesn’t need a ton of bells and whistles to be usable. Wirth understood this and accomplished much. Consider how we’ve been able to fix Voyager - simplicity can save.
- int_19h 2y ago
  It's not unusable, just as Pascal wasn't unusable. It can be very tedious though, e.g. the way errors are handled.
  - skissane 2y ago
    Someone just needs to create a less tedious language that is a thin layer on top of Go. Go++?
int_19h 2y ago
Surely Free Pascal is the most Pascal language that exists and is actively developed today?
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Delphi is still around. Kudos to FreePascal folks though.
pjmlp 2y ago
Nope, that would be FreePascal and Delphi, fast compilation, without paying for a spartan language.
rcarmo 2y ago
I sort of like Go, but also can't bring myself to write it that often. I don't know why--although part if it is fetching libraries directly from git repos.

by densh 2y ago

In my opinion Go is the most Pascal like language that exists today due to fast compilation speed and extremely opinionated pursuit of oversimplifying the language at the detriment of usability.

akira2501 2y ago

> extremely opinionated pursuit of oversimplifying the language at the detriment of usability. Subjective usability. Objectively, the language is quite usable, and many people even prefer it over the many other choices otherwise available to them.

bitwize 2y ago
Go has the nice quality (shared with Pascal) that it pretty much sticks to being a set of computer instructions, which means when you read Go it's easy to understand more or less exactly what the computer is doing. Great for auditing. Not so great for building large systems as abstractions over types.
- akira2501 2y ago
  "Not so great for building large systems that are hard to audit due to the level of type abstraction they have access to." I'll give you that the lack of extensibility is sometimes a unique frustration among programming languages, but this design choice was intentional, and you've incidentally highlighted that, I think.

butterisgood 2y ago

If it’s not usable, why is there so much useful software written in Go? I haven’t had a lot of trouble writing some interesting things in Go that I’ve found difficult to redo in C++ with similar simplicity. Sometimes a language doesn’t need a ton of bells and whistles to be usable. Wirth understood this and accomplished much. Consider how we’ve been able to fix Voyager - simplicity can save.

int_19h 2y ago
It's not unusable, just as Pascal wasn't unusable. It can be very tedious though, e.g. the way errors are handled.
- skissane 2y ago
  Someone just needs to create a less tedious language that is a thin layer on top of Go. Go++?

int_19h 2y ago

Surely Free Pascal is the most Pascal language that exists and is actively developed today?

pjmlp 2y ago
Delphi is still around. Kudos to FreePascal folks though.

pjmlp 2y ago

Nope, that would be FreePascal and Delphi, fast compilation, without paying for a spartan language.

rcarmo 2y ago

I sort of like Go, but also can't bring myself to write it that often. I don't know why--although part if it is fetching libraries directly from git repos.