@fanf That article (more specifically, the people sharing it as a conclusive take-down of Pascal) used to annoy the hell out of me. I grew up with Turbo Pascal and its spiritual successors before switching to C and most of the complaints did not apply at all.
@pervognsen@fanf I keep wondering if I'm wearing rose-colored nostalgia glasses but literally last week a younger colleague was playing around with TP 7.0 (I think it was, one of the vers with a Turbo Vision IDE) in a JS-based emulator on a webpage and was very surprised by how good the UX was, especially considering it's a DOS program from the early 90s.
over the weekend, after reading that rust-gamedev post, i was thinking it would be nice to find one or more compiled languages that are a better fit for rapid prototyping, thought of TP, and then downloaded the current installer for Delphi. And that's when i found out that they do not support macOS as a host platform (so i can't use it).
so it's great that we can just load TP up in a browser like this!
@aminom@rygorous@pervognsen@fanf can anyone recommend any Turbo Pascal books and/or magazine articles from the 80's (the ones that would give you code examples to type in by hand)?
@JamesWidman@aminom@rygorous@fanf I don't think I read any books on TP. I recall Borland's manual was good for what it was. Aside from asking questions to older friends and figuring out things for myself, I mostly picked up stuff from random BBS tutorials (e.g. Denthor's graphics programming tutorials which I'm sure would make me cringe now) and example programs.
@JamesWidman@aminom@rygorous@fanf Oh yeah, definitely cringe: "The ASPHYXIA team uses neither putpixel; we use a DMA-Straight-To-Screen-Kill-Yer-Momma-With-An-Axe type putipixel which is FAST. We will give it out, but only to those of you who show us you are serious about coding."
Apparently Chaos once ruined someone's entire month with this simple exchange (back when nobody know how to do 3D properly):
Them: "We've optimized this vector rotation routine really well. All 12 multiplies are as fast as we can get them." (they were doing 3 successive rotations by Euler angles with 4 muls each.)
Chaos: "12? I need 9."
@rygorous@JamesWidman@aminom@fanf Good thing Glide settled on the right API granularity once and for all: draw a single triangle at a time with grDrawTriangle.
@fanf There's also just a lot of pure rhetoric; I don't know if there's any truth to it, but the rumor I heard was that Kernighan was prompted to write it as a hit-piece by Bell/AT&T management. "Pascal, at least in its standard form, is just plain not suitable for serious programming." The "standard form" qualifier is telling. Meanwhile, the UCSD p-System was an operating system almost entirely written in UCSD Pascal which already existed when he wrote that piece.
@fanf So a lot of the complaints, even when they're technically correct, are akin to someone dismissing C for "serious programming" because it does not have some language feature they consider essential (a proper macro system, more expressive types, templates, operating overloading, etc). The later versions of Wirth's Oberon are extremely stripped down compared to even "standard form" Pascal, and it's perfectly adequate for implementing the quite "serious" Oberon operating system.
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