Making a plea :)

[vfclists]

There seems to be an idea here that Wirth figured out everything there is to know about programming in 1980

Interestingly, in his review article for ACM Communications (March 2021), Wirth mentioned Turbo Pascal but ignored Delphi or Free Pascal. Why? https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/50-years-of-pascal/

Probably because Borland thought it wouldn't be cool to give their product (Delphi) a name that would be immediately associated with Pascal? Funny how that consideration didn't apply to their C++ and Java products.

It is similar how the Pharo group don't want their product to be readily associated with Smalltalk.

[Thaddy]

The name simply comes from Pythia, who was the oracle on mount Parnassus, so somebody at Borland - I think it was Steve - dreamed up the interface between Oracle and Pascal. Get it? Everybody knows that.

[MarkMLl]

4 - Finally a apparently recent (nearly one-one) conversion of a CSharp Coco/R compiler from the original team to a modern version of DELPHI with acceptable licensing. BUT HERE THE PROBLEMS WITH MODERN CONSTRUCTS START :

I'm hoping at some point to do a reference implementation of Tree Meta at some point, which is slightly older and as well as being able to define syntax also takes a fairly competent stab at optimising output. However I'm very keenly aware of the "modern constructs" problem: start using the "clever" stuff which is de-rigeur in Object Pascal ** and it alienate readers who favour some other language- but who might be tempted to use FPC if they had any confidence in the code they were looking at.

** Starting off with a representation where strings can't be reliably iterated as arrays of characters.

MarkMLl

[VisualLab]

Perhaps. But that could result not only from the features (advantages vs. disadvantages) of the product but also from the fact that the supplier (manufacturer) is the same company that supplies the OS and other programs. That is, a kind of reasoning of a large part of customers: "it's a large manufacturer, has experienced engineers, can be trusted, so I'll buy the tool from them". This is a social and economic phenomenon that has little to do with an in-depth technical analysis of the product being purchased (which does not mean that the product is bad, it can be great). In any case, people do not necessarily use common sense when purchasing certain products (some do, some do not). Moreover, if after the purchase the product is not exactly what the buyer wanted, the buyer tries to rationalize his behavior after the purchase (an attempt to rationalize the wrong decision).

Indeed. But we're not considering what people /should/ /have/ been doing, but what they /were/ doing: which was mostly buying BASIC and C on account of UNIX and MS's clout, and if they wanted Pascal going for Borland's product (MS Pascal was not highly regarded, and I don't remember a single copy of QuickPascal being sold).

If we were considering what people /should/ have been doing... well they should have been buying TopSpeed Modula-2 produced by JPI (a Borland spin-off), which was available at about the same time that Turbo Pascal introduced the uses clause and offered better thought out syntax and semantics with stronger type checking even across modules.

MarkMLl

But this is not a consideration of what people should do. This is a simple explanation of a fairly simple social phenomenon. It occurs in many other technical fields that companies engage in.

[VisualLab]

The name simply comes from Pythia, who was the oracle on mount Parnassus, so somebody at Borland - I think it was Steve - dreamed up the interface between Oracle and Pascal. Get it? Everybody knows that.

Yes. The anecdote was that it was a play on words that made sense in English: "If you want to talk to the oracle, go to Delphi." The company "Oracle" was already well-known at the time. The Oracle (Pythia) was based near the Greek city of Delphi. It's probably a good thing they came up with an interesting name and not one "taken from the CEO's a...s" or "designed by a committee" (C#, Python, Rust, etc.).

[Warfley]

Probably because Borland thought it wouldn't be cool to give their product (Delphi) a name that would be immediately associated with Pascal? Funny how that consideration didn't apply to their C++ and Java products.

I mean this goes both ways, in the past 10-15 years Embarcadero has proven that all ideas they have about language design are terrible, so it's easy to not associate with that mess

It's probably a good thing they came up with an interesting name and not one "taken from the CEO's a...s" or "designed by a committee" (C#, Python, Rust, etc.).

Of the languages you named, only C# was designed that way. I generally don't understand this lashing out against python as if it is some new corporate stuff. Python is older than Delphi, it's 33 years old by now and was developed at a university for research projects, which is why it was for the first 20 years of it's life mostly used by mathematicians and physicists. It's not a big corpo language.

Also for Rust:

Rust began as a personal project in 2006 by Mozilla Research employee Graydon Hoare, named after the group of fungi that are "over-engineered for survival".

It was one guys pet project, who named it after mushrooms he found curious.

[MarkMLl]

I generally don't understand this lashing out against python as if it is some new corporate stuff. Python is older than Delphi, it's 33 years old by now and was developed at a university for research projects, which is why it was for the first 20 years of it's life mostly used by mathematicians and physicists. It's not a big corpo language.

I agree. Like I think everybody else around here I'm very uncomfortable with Python's lack of begin-end (or condensed equivalents) but the fact that the language has survived a major rework (v2 to v3) without either forking or haemorrhaging loyalty says a great deal for its foundations. I'd also note that its internal documentation is very good indeed.

Python is, regrettably, something we can't ignore. And any public mockery of it and its large community of users will hurt us, not them.

MarkMLl

[VisualLab]

Probably because Borland thought it wouldn't be cool to give their product (Delphi) a name that would be immediately associated with Pascal? Funny how that consideration didn't apply to their C++ and Java products.

I mean this goes both ways, in the past 10-15 years Embarcadero has proven that all ideas they have about language design are terrible, so it's easy to not associate with that mess

I disagree with that statement. They had both bad and good decisions. For example, it was only during Embarcadero that Unicode support was added because Borland's decision-makers "didn't give a damn". The same goes for developing a 64-bit compiler. Bad decisions include, for example, inline variables for the for loop.

It's probably a good thing they came up with an interesting name and not one "taken from the CEO's a...s" or "designed by a committee" (C#, Python, Rust, etc.).

Of the languages you named, only C# was designed that way. I generally don't understand this lashing out against python as if it is some new corporate stuff. Python is older than Delphi, it's 33 years old by now and was developed at a university for research projects, which is why it was for the first 20 years of it's life mostly used by mathematicians and physicists. It's not a big corpo language.

And who uses and promotes Python? Without corporate support it would still be in a niche. Rust, on the other hand, is a product of the Mozilla foundation. But the project is already "anointed" by some corporations. Except that my statement concerned the name of these languages and not their strenuous promotion So we misunderstood each other

Apart from the issue of earlier mutual misunderstanding, it must be mentioned that Python is one of the worst-designed languages. Probably even worse than JavaScript. The list of flaws is too long to list. It is suitable at best for creating very simple, one-time use scripts. Only that there are many such languages ​​(and they usually have slightly fewer flaws). Besides, Python became a corporate language at least 5 years ago (as usual, i.e. due to management cost savings).

Also for Rust:

Rust began as a personal project in 2006 by Mozilla Research employee Graydon Hoare, named after the group of fungi that are "over-engineered for survival".

It was one guys pet project, who named it after mushrooms he found curious.

The idea is as "spot on" as the Python name. Somehow, people in general associate it with snakes. Who will think of a group of British comedians? It's similar with the name "Rust" - who would associate this name with one of the mushroom families? Only mycologists.

[VisualLab]

I generally don't understand this lashing out against python as if it is some new corporate stuff. Python is older than Delphi, it's 33 years old by now and was developed at a university for research projects, which is why it was for the first 20 years of it's life mostly used by mathematicians and physicists. It's not a big corpo language.

I agree. Like I think everybody else around here I'm very uncomfortable with Python's lack of begin-end (or condensed equivalents) but the fact that the language has survived a major rework (v2 to v3) without either forking or haemorrhaging loyalty says a great deal for its foundations. I'd also note that its internal documentation is very good indeed.

Python is, regrettably, something we can't ignore. And any public mockery of it and its large community of users will hurt us, not them.

MarkMLl

I don't think that discussions about the advantages and disadvantages of human technical thought are something reprehensible. On the contrary, it is completely natural and at least permissible (and even desirable). If something is to be fixed or improved, then criticism is the first step towards achieving this goal. By criticism I mean a concise and clear description of the shortcomings of a solution (including specific, verifiable arguments). Of course, if someone has spent a lot of time and effort on creating a solution, they are not likely to be willing to correct the defects, because it means new effort and a waste of time. It is known that people generally avoid (or minimize) incurring costs.

I agree, however, that there is no point in bullying or ridiculing. However, a large portion of people perceive criticism as harassment or ridicule (usually when they treat some technical solution as an object of worship or adoration).

[Warfley]

I disagree with that statement. They had both bad and good decisions. For example, it was only during Embarcadero that Unicode support was added because Borland's decision-makers "didn't give a damn". The same goes for developing a 64-bit compiler. Bad decisions include, for example, inline variables for the for loop.

Unicode support with UTF16, which at the time it was introduced was already known to be insufficient.
UTF-8 was standardized in 2003 long before the Unicode support of Delphi, so they don't even have the excuse that they started to early, like Microsoft has with their systems.

So in theory good idea, but in embarcadero fashion, completely terrible implementation.

And who uses and promotes Python? Without corporate support it would still be in a niche. Rust, on the other hand, is a product of the Mozilla foundation. But the project is already "anointed" by some corporations. Except that my statement concerned the name of these languages and not their strenuous promotion So we misunderstood each other

The reason python got its uptick was mostly with the data science boom 10 years ago, as with its support for number theory and statistics libraries and native arbitrary size int support made it perfectly suited for this.
And this development came out of the academic world. Python got successfull, and then companies invested into it, not the other way around

Apart from the issue of earlier mutual misunderstanding, it must be mentioned that Python is one of the worst-designed languages. Probably even worse than JavaScript. The list of flaws is too long to list. It is suitable at best for creating very simple, one-time use scripts. Only that there are many such languages ​​(and they usually have slightly fewer flaws). Besides, Python became a corporate language at least 5 years ago (as usual, i.e. due to management cost savings).

I've worked on big projects where management decided to use python even though it is very badly suited for the use case (Qt GUI development in Python is probably the worst thing you can do), but that's the cycle. Python is a extremely good language for certain things. There's a reason why it's the language of choice for mathematicians and physicists, and has even replaced Matlab as the go-to language for engineers. It's great for number crunching and everything math related.
The problem is, language gets successful in a certain field, management sees it and demands use for things it is not well suited for and one company is copying the other and you have a bunch of companies misusing the language.

Also no language is worse than JavaScript and probably there never will be a worse language, because JavaScript does never break with backwards compatibility, so any awful feature that was added once stays forever.
Python with typing support and all the other new stuff is actually quite good.

The idea is as "spot on" as the Python name. Somehow, people in general associate it with snakes. Who will think of a group of British comedians? It's similar with the name "Rust" - who would associate this name with one of the mushroom families? Only mycologists.

I mean that's the thing about names, often their initial meaning gets lost. Take eclipse ide, why is it called eclipse? Because they originally wanted to make an open source competitor to java, java was made by Sun, so eclipse is overshadowing sun.
Then sun open sourced java, killing the nations of eclipse and they used the tooling they developed to instead build an IDE.
Today people just think eclipse is nothing more than a cool name, but it had meaning to those that know

[VisualLab]

I disagree with that statement. They had both bad and good decisions. For example, it was only during Embarcadero that Unicode support was added because Borland's decision-makers "didn't give a damn". The same goes for developing a 64-bit compiler. Bad decisions include, for example, inline variables for the for loop.

Unicode support with UTF16, which at the time it was introduced was already known to be insufficient.
UTF-8 was standardized in 2003 long before the Unicode support of Delphi, so they don't even have the excuse that they started to early, like Microsoft has with their systems.

So in theory good idea, but in embarcadero fashion, completely terrible implementation.

And what specifically? That it's UTF-16? And doesn't MS itself state in its documentation:

"Wide characters encoded using UTF-16LE (for little-endian) are the native character format for Windows." (Support for Unicode)

And who uses and promotes Python? Without corporate support it would still be in a niche. Rust, on the other hand, is a product of the Mozilla foundation. But the project is already "anointed" by some corporations. Except that my statement concerned the name of these languages and not their strenuous promotion So we misunderstood each other

The reason python got its uptick was mostly with the data science boom 10 years ago, as with its support for number theory and statistics libraries and native arbitrary size int support made it perfectly suited for this.
And this development came out of the academic world. Python got successfull, and then companies invested into it, not the other way around

The academic world didn't use Matlab? Strange, at my university they used Matlab. Matlab has a much better reputation than Python. We all know that there is another reason for using Python

As for statistical calculations (and expensive packages like SPSS, Statistica), that's what R was created for (and has been available for many years).

Apart from the issue of earlier mutual misunderstanding, it must be mentioned that Python is one of the worst-designed languages. Probably even worse than JavaScript. The list of flaws is too long to list. It is suitable at best for creating very simple, one-time use scripts. Only that there are many such languages ​​(and they usually have slightly fewer flaws). Besides, Python became a corporate language at least 5 years ago (as usual, i.e. due to management cost savings).

I've worked on big projects where management decided to use python even though it is very badly suited for the use case (Qt GUI development in Python is probably the worst thing you can do), but that's the cycle. Python is a extremely good language for certain things. There's a reason why it's the language of choice for mathematicians and physicists, and has even replaced Matlab as the go-to language for engineers. It's great for number crunching and everything math related.
The problem is, language gets successful in a certain field, management sees it and demands use for things it is not well suited for and one company is copying the other and you have a bunch of companies misusing the language.

I agree about the problematic use of Python in large projects. Especially in connection with Qt.

As for the use of Python for calculations by mathematicians and physicists, I would rather disagree. There is Matlab, yes, its licenses are expensive. Octave and Scilab have existed for many years. As for Python's mathematical libraries - aren't they written in C (and C++)?

We know well that the reasons for using Python at universities are:

• lack of programming skills among many scientists (not programmers),
• lack of desire and time to learn a decent programming language,
• engaging students and PhD students to write scripts who do not want to learn how to use a decent tool, preferring to "glue" scripts "using the Internet" (and recently AI).

Unfortunately, this is the truth about Python at universities. I understand that a professor may not have time to bearably master a decent programming language. But there are computing environments that are much better suited to automating calculations (I've already mentioned: Matlab or Octave/Scilab or Julia). On the other hand, a student or PhD student knows that no one will pay them for this, and later in life they will probably do something else anyway. So why should he make an effort?

From the descriptions of the genesis of this language (and its documentation) it follows that it is a general-purpose scripting language, without a specific focus. What we have been seeing for at least 10 years is a mere fashion, driven by laziness. A small amount of laziness among programmers can be useful because it creates some tools (or facilities). But here there is laziness on an unprecedented scale - the laziness of ignorance and a total disregard for its consequences.

As for the fact that management in companies is trying to force the use of Python, I completely agree with you. This is of course due to the desire to reduce costs. But without thinking this issue through. This is a mindless action combined with a blatant disregard for later potential problems.

Also no language is worse than JavaScript and probably there never will be a worse language, because JavaScript does never break with backwards compatibility, so any awful feature that was added once stays forever.
Python with typing support and all the other new stuff is actually quite good.

The JavaScript problem is somewhat mitigated by the presence of TypeScript. That's why "somewhat" because various computer baboons try to "glue" monsters using "Electron" and similar "inventions".

The idea is as "spot on" as the Python name. Somehow, people in general associate it with snakes. Who will think of a group of British comedians? It's similar with the name "Rust" - who would associate this name with one of the mushroom families? Only mycologists.

I mean that's the thing about names, often their initial meaning gets lost. Take eclipse ide, why is it called eclipse? Because they originally wanted to make an open source competitor to java, java was made by Sun, so eclipse is overshadowing sun.
Then sun open sourced java, killing the nations of eclipse and they used the tooling they developed to instead build an IDE.
Today people just think eclipse is nothing more than a cool name, but it had meaning to those that know

You're right. Although the example I gave with the name "Python" (using one word from a 4-word name of a group of comedians) shows that, as usual, good intentions/good intentions don't help (because "the road to hell is paved with good intentions"). It was a bit better with Rust. The creators of the Julia language came up with a much better name.

[Warfley]

And what specifically? That it's UTF-16? And doesn't MS itself state in its documentation:

"Wide characters encoded using UTF-16LE (for little-endian) are the native character format for Windows." (Support for Unicode)

Just because it's the windows native character format doesn't make the decision good. It's also the native character format to the JVM but Java the programming language is UTF-8 based. You can have high level languages using different concepts to their low level machine interfaces. UTF-16 makes sense for Kernels like Windows or low level virtual machines like the JVM because 1 char = 1 word makes things very efficient. But it's absolutely terrible for actual developers of high level applications that should interface with users.
The unicode space has codepoints for 100k chinese characters alone, not counting any other alphabets. A UTF-16 char can only hold 65k values. How is it solved? By introducing unicode spces, basically an additional information encoding how the unicode characters are encoded... But guys we totally solved codepages with UTF-16, we are fully international and don't have to exchange encoding metainformation anymore.

Delphi is not a language for low level kernel development, it's a language for interactive user facing applications. and there UTF-16 is a terrible choice.

The academic world didn't use Matlab? Strange, at my university they used Matlab. Matlab has a much better reputation than Python. We all know that there is another reason for using Python

I mean of course, the main driving factor for the switch to python is cost. Matlab costs the universities thousands of euros per year per student, python is free. But I studied computer science in the 2010s, and while in the early 2010s like 2014 you'd still see a lot of matlab, by 2016 around pretty much half of the chairs at least provided all the lecture material for both, matlab and python. Like I said, python blew up around 10 years ago, the big corpo investment was then around 2018 to now.

As for statistical calculations (and expensive packages like SPSS, Statistica), that's what R was created for (and has been available for many years).

I mean you can use R, there are specialized languages for everything, but whenever I worked with non computer scientists, e.g. I did my masters thesis in a project chaired by electrical engineers, or worked during my masters on some medical research, they all used python. Because to non computer scientists it's easy, intuitive and provides all the tools you need.

As for the use of Python for calculations by mathematicians and physicists, I would rather disagree. There is Matlab, yes, its licenses are expensive. Octave and Scilab have existed for many years. As for Python's mathematical libraries - aren't they written in C (and C++)?

Mostly even fortran. Python is a glue language. You don't write big algorithmis or stuff in it, you use it to take libraries like numpy or pandas, which are backed in Fortran or C/C++ and just use python to organize the data you want to perform the computations on. The libraries are the machines that do the work and python are the assembly line putting the things together.

And it's really great for that. If your problem is: "I have a bunch of output files with data and need to crunch the numbers using standard tools and do some plotting", python is absolutely perfect. Thats the reason why it became the language of choice for machine learning/AI. The heavy code is done in libraries like torch, and the actual models are only like 100 lines of glue code to take some activation functions and back propagation methods and glue them together into the torch driven AI library.
In the time it would take me to setup a Pascal project to develop some AI image recognition model, I'm probably already finished in python, because setting up a neural network is just a few lines of code.

The JavaScript problem is somewhat mitigated by the presence of TypeScript. That's why "somewhat" because various computer baboons try to "glue" monsters using "Electron" and similar "inventions".

I mean typescript solves some of the problems but because it's a superset, the underlying problems are not solved. Things like that they have a max, min, etc. functions and then Math.max, Math.min, etc. which are the same but work slightly differently (when it comes to IEEE edge cases like NaN, Inf, etc.) or that you have linear equality with == and all that fuzz. It's just inherently broken.

Also I personally don't think electron apps are broken, VSCode is an electron app and by now my favorite editor. It's that bad electron apps are broken. When someone knows what they are doing (or in the case of VSCode, Microsoft just throwing enough money at it), it works fine. A clean VSCode starts up in around 100-200ms. The reason most electron apps are slow and bloated is because they are badly designed, slow low performance code, with thousands of dependencies, etc.
Thats the real javascript hell, the fact that 70 million people a week download a dependency is-number, which at it's core is nothing other than "!isNaN(var)" (or "!Math.isNaN(var)" because Javascript xD)

[LV]

Pascal is slowly but steadily gaining popularity (according to the TIOBE index top 10).
https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

[MarkMLl]

As for the use of Python for calculations by mathematicians and physicists, I would rather disagree. There is Matlab, yes, its licenses are expensive. Octave and Scilab have existed for many years. As for Python's mathematical libraries - aren't they written in C (and C++)?

At least some (CAD-related etc.) stuff is written in FORTRAN.

The difference is that the Python community has made sure that it knows how to wrap C, FORTRAN and- in particular C++, while Object Pascal has little interest in interworking with the latter.

On the other hand, a student or PhD student knows that no one will pay them for this, and later in life they will probably do something else anyway. So why should he make an effort?

Bad argument. Test equipment companies like Tektronix and HP (in their prime), high-end silicon companies like Intel, Xilinx and Altium, and CAD vendors have always offered good deals for university departments and often individual students. The logic is that very often a postgrad joining a company will have some say in what equipment and software is used- and that's particularly the case in a new niche where well-funded startups are common.

So. Is there still anything at all that we can do to raise the profile of Object Pascal in universities? Because it seems to me that that's something that Borland walked away from when it decided to start focusing on enterprise-scale development tools.

MarkMLl

[Joanna from IRC]

Sure if you fancy contacting many schools and telling them about how great pascal is. There might be some takers in less affluent countries.

In other words most people don’t know about modern pascal existing because we don’t have much in the way of public relations.