Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zwnow 975 days ago
Having to write C/AL to make a living, which is based on Pascal, I can safely say it shouldnt be in the race anymore...
2 comments

Interesting take. Pascal is definitely a niche language but most of the community around FPC and Lazarus seems very positive and welcoming.

Would you mind expanding on why you feel this way? What Pascal do you use? Do you use Delphi or FPC/Lazarus? What don’t you like about the language (or your particular vendor implementation)?

I have to say I wrote this as more of a joke as I do have no actual experience with Pascal. Looking at the syntax I just assumed it to be extremely similar to the language I have to work with on a daily basis. And with that, just as limited.

C/AL is a product of Microsoft and is only used in their ERP Software Navision. It's a horrible experience to work with as you don't have a lot of modern languages features just for the sake of readability.

At some point in the article the author wrote that Rust code isn't readable for example. I'd argue code shouldn't have to be readable by non-programmers. And especially not if the language sacrifices features like creating objects or dynamic arrays...

But as I wrote, I don't have actual experience with Pascal so maybe it's actually better.

Free Pascal is a lot more robust and featureful than whatever God-awful ERP language you have to work in. It's a spiritual descendant of Turbo Pascal and Delphi, which were used to develop diverse applications from line-of-business to games for decades. Dynamic memory allocation and objects are built-in. It is definitely NOT the Pascal of Kernighan's "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language".
What are the top 2 pain points you encountered?