I am a complete neophyte to Pascal and Lazarus. Why would anyone program in Pascal, given the plethora of other, more current open-source programming languages available out there? What features does it have that those other languages do not? As just one example, Julia.
Why anything? One question when considering a language could be: is it Turing complete. According to
Wiki most languages are, so that settles the argument of "language X can do A, can language Y do the same". Of course implementing functionality A in a particular language may require some effort.
Example 1 - Say someone is determined to use garbage collection in Pascal - a "feature" not supported by the compiler. But you can write classes with reference counting that automatically free itself when the instance's reference count reaches 0. And no, I don't want garbage collection embedded in the language, it would be horrible to write anything useful in a microcontroller with say 128 bytes of RAM.
Example 2 - Let us consider a different type of task: solving a differential equation. Very easy in Julia (and C/C++, Fortran, gPROMS, Matlab, R...), more difficult in Pascal because you have to find a user library that implements the functionality (e.g.
this one), or grab a numerical text book and code it yourself (just like in Julia, except Julia has many contributors so chances are you will find an existing library).
Example 3 - Generating payroll information from a database - relatively easily accomplished in Pascal, can be done in Julia too. Publish results as PDF or HTML? Yes for Pascal, not sure about Julia. Run all this logic as CGI on a web server? Pascal - yes, Julia - not sure (well, I guess you can use C/C++ hiding behind a library...).
What major corporations use it? Thank you.
I started using Borland Pascal and that lead to Delphi. In the 80's and 90's Borland was pretty successful and made great tools. When Delphi started moving toward .Net I got fed up with the bulky IDE and language extensions I didn't use. Eventually switched to FPC/Lazarus even though I had a commercial license for Delphi 2008. That said, I'm not up to date with commercial applications in Free Pascal/Lazarus.
My view is that choosing a language is pretty much a matter of chance, circumstance and personal preference (if you get paid to program the choice may not be yours anyway). Pascal was the 3rd language I discovered at school (after BASIC and Logo) and the possibilities it unlocked pulled me in completely. Over the years I've briefly dabbled in other languages (Modula2, Fortran, Matlab, C/C++) but never really encountered something that was impossible to do in Pascal. The only motivation (for me) to look at other languages from time to time is to exploit specific libraries and code examples.
Since I'm a hobby programmer I don't have choices forced on me, I also don't have to wonder what fad language will make me look accomplished from a recruiter's perspective.
In the end I view programming languages in the same light as spoken languages - use whatever language you are best able to express yourself in. Unless you get payed to do otherwise. Of course you may not know this when starting with programming...
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