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Comment by andai

2 days ago

Well, Python and Pascal were designed as a teaching language, and ended up being remarkably good for actual programming.

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andai

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keyle  2 days ago

I didn't know this regarding Pascal, do you have any source ref on this?

  • zabzonk  2 days ago

    From wikipedia:

    "Pascal was influenced by the ALGOL W efforts, with the explicit goals of teaching programming in a structured fashion and for the development of system software.[5] A generation of students used Pascal as an introductory language in undergraduate courses."

    Its grammar made it relatively easy to write compilers for the language, which could be done as undergraduate exercises. Of course, this did not make it so popular with professional programmers - see http://eprg.org/computerphile/pascal.pdf by Brian Kernighan, although extended Pascals such as Delphi were very productive in the Windows environment.

    • musicale  2 days ago

      I have the greatest respect for Prof. Kernighan, but history hasn't been kind to C's unbounded arrays and strings, however convenient they may be for the programmer. Moreover, just two years after his critique, Turbo Pascal would come out with an environment that is still revered as a pioneering and exceptionally productive IDE. It outsold C compilers by multiple orders of magnitude in the mid-1980s. (And that's ignoring unlicensed copies.)

      Turbo Pascal's successor, Delphi, was a successful rapid application development environment, and still being used today. Pascal was used extensively at Apple for the Apple III and Lisa, and was also the original development environment for Mac apps.[1]

      But he was probably right about Ada, which has survived and may even be enjoying something of a renaissance as a fix for the sins of C (and C++) that isn't as alienating as Rust.

      [1] https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_applelisapriefHistoryo...

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    • keyle  2 days ago

      v nice thanks. I think Pascal was the first language we were thought in school, just before C.