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Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL (1982) (web.mit.edu)
76 points by BlackLamb on Sept 14, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 55 comments



This 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.''


> 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.


I'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.


I 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


This 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


Both are great epics of hacking history. I just wonder whether there are any more?


Sure; the 500 mile email comes to mind (it gets reposted here periodically):

http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html


Another one is the Unix Recovery Legend: (also posted here periodically)

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



True, those are also good ones. Although I have to say the story of Mel is still my favourite :-)


One 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.


Beyond 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.


An absolute gem of an application that not only does the job but near pefect ux.


Total Commander is also written in Delphi. Such a great program I would still be using if I was on windows.


You can use Double Commander (Linux version for you, I guess), which tries to be very close to Total Commander (plug-in compatibility even) and is written in Delphi too.


Unfortunately I'm on osx. But I already got used to coreutils, which are way more portable :)


Well technically that would be Object Pascal, yes?


I have actual nightmares about developing in Delphi. I can't believe there's a Delphi project that people speak this highly of.


The 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/) does today. One of my weapons of choice nowadays when it comes to GUI development.


The 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.


Try to get your hands on an old copy of Delphi 1 or 2. Thousands of pages of documentation in PDF format. Docs used to be so much better back then, it's sad. I still have a copy of Delphi 7 lying around just because the help system was/is so good.


Sadly I was more concerned about FreePascal than Delphi as well. But yeah, it's sad that documentation is dead these days.


It's possible that being thrown at an ancient, loosely-managed Delphi project has given me a poor first impression of it.


Hah, the same thing could really be said of VB.Net


Really? Delphi was generally a pleasure to use for the couple of years that I did.


Delphi is great and powerful, but it was so easy that a lot of people did bad things with it, ruining it's name.


Delphi's still around. You can even write mobile apps in it.

http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi


Oh, I'm well aware of Delphi's continued existence. I'm maintaining a 15-year-old Delphi project right now.

I should be clear that I like Object Pascal. I just dislike the degree to which Delphi insists on holding your hand, and I hate the absurdly bloated code base for which that behavior is at least partly to blame.


I am actually surprised by the number of clients I've dealt with developing products in some form of Delphi and other archaic languages.


Delphi was a wonderful product. Super fast compilation, nice IDE, small executables with no runtimes.

Age of Wonders was written with Delphi also. Great game.


One 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.


This 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.


Although 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?


I'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.


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.



Already amused by the comments based only on the title but not on the content:

"Real Commenters don't read the contents".


Was 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.



Yes, it's a computing-themed pastiche of "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche".


Related: Real Men Don't Play GURPS: 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."


I immediately thought of Bret Victor's wonderful talk on, 'The Future of Programming'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4


I am outraged by all this quiche-shaming.


It's a cheese-and-egg pie, what's not to love about quiche?


Often cooked with ham. I mean it's basically an improved omelette...


I'm surprised how well the letter 'o' looks as a bullet point.


Real 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.


If anybody wants to try:

https://github.com/blakemcbride/TECOC


>thcught

you almost got me c, you almost, got me.


I did 4 years in high school.


Today this is true for a more obvious reason; Pascal is legacy.


It'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/?


We 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.


"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.


The 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




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