[abroncs]

I learned programming with Pascal in high school, and it definitely didn't stink. It's way easier than C and lets you focus on the actual programming, not the idiosyncrasies of the language. It's very much like Python in this regard, but I think it's even better as a first languge. It's more explicit and to someone completely new to programming, that really pays off IMO.

[gshubert17]

I've taught beginning programming courses at the college level to adults for more than 20 years. In the early 1990s we used Pascal, specifically Turbo Pascal for Microsoft DOS and Windows. It worked very well for me as a language and environment for learning to program. After two courses in Pascal, students went on to C, C++, and Java.

My university has since changed the curriculum so that the first language of instruction is C++, leaving out objects and classes until after the first three courses. I experience and share the frustrations of beginning students wrestling with the minutiae of C++ coding, which leaves less time for seeing the "big picture" of programming. These struggles drain a lot of the energy which can be generated by making progress learning to program.

Some of the rationale for dropping Pascal, I think, was that "nobody" in the real world used it. This was untrue, of course, but the Pascal community didn't have the self-promotion and media buzz that Java did.

I find it curious that two languages deliberately designed for ease of instruction -- Pascal and Scheme -- should have such a bad reputation in some quarters.

[icelancer]

Pascal was my 2nd language after Apple IIe BASIC. I also found it to be a great language to learn. I have some bad memories involving Delphi, though...

[xxs]

Without a compiler BASIC was absolutely terrible performance wise, so assembler was kind of a must (at least to me).

When I was trying to learn object orient programming with Turbo Pascal, it felt rally hard till I saw the exact compiled code. But I liked Pascal very much... and Delphi even more. Actually I liked everything about Delphi, compared to Visual Basic it was absolutely amazing and it came with the source code of its libraries! What was your bad experience with?

[72deluxe]

Does anyone use Lazarus and Free Pascal for anything? I only tinkered with Delphi when it used to come on PC Plus cover CDs back in the day, before using C++ Builder at work. I know that C++ Builder lost significant (!) market share after the name changes to Inprise and being bought by Embercarado, although those things weren't necessarily the real reasons for this market share loss.

I was pleasantly surprised to come across Lazarus and Free Pascal and thought it might be a way for my brother to do some programming, instead of C++ (which I use, but he doesn't know).

[marktangotango]

I studied TP many years ago, and have fond memories of it. I looked into using Free Pascal for a system level project involving networking, threading, and concurrency (here I mean things like synchronized collections). In particular the threading and concurrency libraries seemed to be limited, and not as 'nice' as alternatives in other languages (boost, or java concurrent utils). Also the language is sufficiently complex that I decided I may as well use c or c++.

[72deluxe]

I thought that Lazarus looked easy enough to get my brother started with programming, due to the easy nature of "controls" that you drag + drop from the palette, but such a hope hasn't materialised yet. Good to know someone else looked into it though.

I note that on Mac it is still built using Carbon; not sure if Cocoa is in the works?

[dubya]

I really didn't like Pascal in high school, but this was ~1990 and we were using Apple IIe's, so no Turbo Pascal. I remember strings and printing being a nuisance. Later we got to use Logo and that was much more satisfying.