> Compilers with array bounds checking (...) stifle creativity, (...) and make it impossible to modify the operating system code with negative subscripts.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
"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.''