
Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL (1982) - brudgers
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html
======
explosion
I remember taking AP Computer Science in high school and learning Pascal.
Anyone else remember doing this? The AP Comp Sci exams were in Pascal until
1998.

~~~
analog31
My high school taught BASIC in 1981, but then I learned Pascal on my own
because some of the nearby colleges were using it. When Turbo Pascal came out,
my dad happened to read about it in the Wall Street Journal, and got me a copy
for my birthday. I kept up with TP through version 5. I was _dead certain_
that Pascal would displace C, and today, when I have to write in C, my
programs are either Pascal-like, or wrong.

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.

Admittedly, I've always preferred "real programmers don't use" languages.

But my other early influence was Steve Ciarcia. Real programmers program with
a soldering iron. ;-)

~~~
tsotha
>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
>> 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
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
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.

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jkot
I grow up with Borland Turbo Pascal 5.5. My machine was PC XT with 6 MHz, 0.6
MB RAM and 20MB hdd. Pascal had IDE which ran smoothly, supported mouse, could
edit multiple files, copy&paste, had debuger, compilation took 10 seconds...

And most importantly documentation was translated to my native language.

C back than would have notepad (NCEdit), manual in english full of assembler
and command line compiler.

~~~
methou
I liked Turbo Pascal back in my childhood too, even wanted to replicate one
myself.

Now I use python, but have a lot of headaches with debugging/GIL.

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Red_Tarsius
All I have to say is [https://xkcd.com/378/](https://xkcd.com/378/)

~~~
bwldrbst
We could save a lot of typing if xkcd:// was a protocol understood by
browsers. For example, xkcd://927

~~~
methou
as well as r://

------
hsitz
I get the feeling that commenters aren't reading the linked article at all,
just latching onto the mention of PASCAL in the title.

This article is almost the opposite of Brian Kernighan's "Why Pascal is Not My
Favorite Language". Kernighan criticized Pascal, essentially, for not being as
advanced as C.

In contrast, the linked article is written from perspective of old-time
FORTRAN programmer and essentially criticizes PASCAL for being too advanced,
"structured programming" and all that stupid, frilly, "advanced", academic,
"computer science" stuff. "We get stuff done the old-school way; we don't need
no new-fangled language!"

The linked article could be rewritten with some appropriate changes and titled
"Real Programmers Don't Use Haskell (or Rust, or . . .)" and written from the
perspective of a C/C++/Java or Go(!) programmer.

------
gaius
In the future, people who write JavaScript without a framework will call
themselves "real programmers".

~~~
scriptproof
In the future, JavaScript will be the virtual machine of many languages. But
maybe "real programmers" still will use JS code directly.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
[https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-
death...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-
javascript)

------
AdeptusAquinas
Reminds me of 'The Nightwatch' by James Mickens (PDF):
[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/people/mickens/thenightw...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/people/mickens/thenightwatch.pdf)

------
cbd1984
This link comes with a bit more context about Mel and the machine he
programmed: [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-
mel.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html)

------
azinman2
Ok I know this article as old and blahblahblah, but seriously? This line of
reasoning is idiotic.

Life should be simpler, not more complex. By this line of logic a "real
programmer" should be soldering wires or building their own CPUs and
resistors. Man has evolved higher and higher levels of reasoning and tools for
a reason: increased expressivity allows for more sophisticated thought. Try
building a modern web browser this way... Good luck.

I hate this bullshit that somehow has still stuck with us over time. Have deep
knowledge and understanding -- but expertise and talent isn't the same thing
as low level.

~~~
V-2
Doesn't the article strike you as ironic?

~~~
azinman2
There's enough crusty engineers out there that would agree with this that I
can't tell.

------
zura
As someone who got interested in modern Object Pascal recently, any
recommendations for influential/canonical books? (Like SICP, Bjarne's TC++PL,
etc..)

~~~
pjmlp
My first introduction to Object Pascal were the Turbo Pascal 5.5 manuals and
the first Turbo Vision application attempts.

Back then OOP was still the new kid on the block, so the other books that
helped me get into OOP where

\- The Xerox PARC Smalltalk books,
[http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/](http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/)

\- "Eiffel: The Language", Bertrand Meyer

\- "An Object-Oriented Environment: Principles and Application", Bertrand
Meyer

\- "Designing Object Oriented C++ Applications Using The Booch Method"

\- "Project Oberon" and "Algorithms and Data Structures, Oberon version",
[http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/](http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/)

\- "Object-Oriented Programming in Oberon-2.",
[http://ssw.jku.at/Research/Books/](http://ssw.jku.at/Research/Books/)

\- "Component Software: Beyond Object-Oriented Programming", first edition
uses Component Pascal

There was hardly any Object Pascal representative book, so those books were
what made the grasp OO concepts across what were then new languages, more than
the specific way of doing OO.

------
darrenmc
I have always loved this article and I remember it posted on the wall of the
CS break room. I enjoyed it so much that it was the first thing I searched for
when AltaVista was released. I think it influenced and introduced me to the
hacker ethos. Although I don’t qualify as a real programmer as I graduated
with Pascal, C, COBOL and Haskell under my belt with no Fortran.

------
a-saleh
I remember my 14 year old self disliking Pascal and liking C, because C had {}
instead of Begin and End and you could do funny stuff inside of C for-cycle.

I remember my 20 self disliking Pascal and liking Java, because while my
class-mates were bussy re-writing quick-sort at a beginning of each assigment,
I just imported SortedTreeMap :-)

~~~
zamalek
The strength of Pascal is the spirit of the language and the compiler. You can
get some really high quality machine code out of something that is cognitively
straightforward - it's something that, in my opinion, no language has achieved
since.

The syntax is an utter disgrace.

------
lwf
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Men_Don%27t_Eat_Quiche](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Men_Don%27t_Eat_Quiche)

------
xpda
I was programming Pascal and Fortran in 1982, and I take exception to this.
Real programmers drink Diet Coke, NOT coffee.

------
cbd1984
This link comes with a bit more context about Mel and the machine he
programmed: [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-
mel.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html)

~~~
greglindahl
Uh, yeah, I link to Mel's story in the Real Programmer article, at the top.

~~~
cbd1984
But not the version with context.

------
hyc_symas
I wonder if real programmers use virtual machines though.

~~~
cbd1984
Real programmers have been using virtual machines since CP-40.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_CP-40](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_CP-40)

