from C# to Pascal, why?

[Weiss]

came across some forum member signature, "from C# to FPC" or something like that. It raised my eyebrow. I thought I am the only one.

This raised the question. Why? Did you not hear that Pascal is dead.

My reason was silly. At the time I was trying to write a simple app in C#, purely technical task. Being a noob as I am, I struggled with data being different sizes and every time I had to create new (bigger or smaller) matrix and copy contents into this new one. And then I heard something that matrixes can be dynamically re-sized in Pascal.

I want to hear from more experienced programmers, what was your reason.

[edgarrod71]

When I was at the university, I heard also that Pascal was dead, but it was 30 years since then, years later I found Delphi, so Pascal was not dead... there were so many good programs made with Delphi and even old pascal like Wolfenstein 3D, Panda Antivirus, Skype and others!  So is Pascal dead?  No.  Simply the head of Delphi (Anders Helsberg) was "hired" by Microsoft to develop C#, and the idea was to make C++ powerful yet simpler.  What did Anders put on that language?  If you know Delphi and a little of C++, you know C#.  So?  It's more alive than ever, simply Microsoft put more market strength and they like to "kill" other competitors.

[dbannon]

See the link below to my pet project, tomboy-ng.

Tomboy Notes was big ten years a go, it was built on Mono and GTK2, ran on Windows and Linux and briefly MacOS pre OSX10.  Ubuntu ran a note syning server for it, and it was shipped, by default with quite a lot of linux distros. Had a team of, perhaps, 10 active devs.

But it got harder and harder to keep up with the changes to mono (tracking C#) and getting a GTK2 running on windows became awkward too. So, slowly it died, still has a few users, no new release for four or five years.

In discussion with someone, I said I would try for a new release but when confronted with the C# code, I was lost. I looked around for a replacement, discovered FPC/Lazarus, remembered doing some Pascal at Uni, felt safe.  Caused a few laughs on the Tomboy mailing list, but reasonably quickly had a mockup working, now in its 36th release !

Good decision ?  you better believe it !

Davo

[Ñuño_Martínez]

(...)  the head of Delphi (Anders Helsberg) was "hired" by Microsoft to develop C#, and the idea was to make C++ powerful yet simpler. (...)

Nope:  the idea was to steal Java's market. 

On topic, Pascal dead was a marketing decision from Microsoft when their Pascal compiler flops and decided to focus in VisualBasic.  They also deaded Java when they launched C#.
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* Deaded -> Killed