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by xyzelement
922 days ago
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Barely related. I set out to do this year’s advent of code in Turbo Pascal in honor of its 40th anniversary (there was an HN story a few weeks ago) TP was my language for AP computer science in high school and I felt good about it. The current FreePascal implements features a dos-looking IDE that worked almost seamlessly over SSH and gave it a nice retro feel. But the retro feel got old after a few days. I found my TP solutions to advent of code verbose. Just the amount of typing you had to do to achieve what can be a python 2 liner was astounding in retrospect. I don’t often think about the programming efficiency of languages themselves but man I didn’t have time to do AOC in TP but I do have time to do it in python. |
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I couldn't agree more. Were it not for Turbo Pascal and AP Computer Science, I can't imagine I'd have found myself writing software for a living. Writing code in Turbo Pascal at 7:10 AM in the morning under The Dzwon[0] was the best part of my childhood.
The language was amazing. For the first time in my life, I could instruct a computer to do something, hit F6 (I think) and get an executable file. It was like magic to my 8th grade eyes[1]. I remember hacking a BBS together and being frustrated at the paint speed, investigating, and discovering that I could just use inline assembly to write characters to the screen. The IDE had syntax highlighting, a compiler, and the standard library all fit on a floppy disk along with the source code we wrote in class. We learned on non-networked, IIRC IBM PS/2 512MB PCs with two internal 3.5" floppy drives and no hard disks.
It amazed me when I began my career at a telecom -- as a member of "IT Support" at the time -- that my first big project was installing Microsoft Visual Studio on 20 developer PCs so they could write code in Visual Basic. I hadn't been writing code professionally at that point but still tinkered in Borland Pascal with a little C++ and I'm thinking ... the professional world picked BASIC? Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. In reality, we wrote nothing in VB; it was a one-off. And I also had no idea, at the time, exactly what "Visual Basic" was. I was just picturing that language my buddies with "Commodore 64"s used. In a lot of ways, VB and Pascal shared some things that aren't common in C-like langauges -- they both defaulted to case insensitive string comparisons and code[2].
[0] Over the years I've come to discover that HS Programming teachers tend to be a bit off. Ours was a single man who took off two weeks before the last day of school to spend his summer traveling internationally to places that aren't known for being tourist friendly.
[1] I had an odd childhood. My Dad and I built a PC a few years prior and he started a business for me to do so for others. We'd put in a bid to the district for a tech refresh. The CS teacher saw the name on the bid, realized he had my sister in class, talked to her and found out about me. I was invited to take the AP CS class over at the HS in exchange for an earlier morning, walking over to the JHS afterward as my "1st Hour".
[2] Gosh, it's been so long, I'm second-guessing that statement. I remember keywords and the like were not case sensitive and a few of us took to capitalizing them, making it look like our programs were yelling a lot but I had only passing exposure to VB in the form of VBS and (a lot less) VBA so it escapes me.