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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

Turbo Pascal for DOS. Simple, compact, quick, well documented, reasonably easy to learn, and not too expensive.

I think that bloat is the enemy of beauty, so we're probably likely to find beauty in software that does a few things well.

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- Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than: http://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html

- A Personal History of Compilation Speed, Part 2: http://prog21.dadgum.com/47.html

Turbo Pascal 5 got me into programming. I wish people would build smaller things again.

Remember punching in 4 pages of Pascal from a PC Magazine in early 90s. I had no idea about anything, syntax, semantics... it was long and painful.

I also learned to properly program using Turbo Pascal. You might enjoy Go. I find its small language, library, and tools that I can keep in my head leave me feeling similar to how I felt using Turbo Pascal back in the day.

Or perhaps Nim: http://howistart.org/posts/nim/1 (That article btw, is itself an example of beautiful software. So short and sweet, and still manage to cover a pretty deep rabbit hole of computer science and plain fun, with it's mandelbrot-in-brainfuck-in-nim)

My personal favorite thing about TP:

  begin
    asm
      mov ax, 10h
      ...

I didn't go quite that far, but I did some insane stuff using the built-in i/o port access and the parallel printer port.

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