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Comment by buserror | Hacker News Reader

everything was written in pascal back then, not just Photoshop. I spent years writing pascal as a professional mac developer before Lightspeed C (which became THINK, then Symantec C later on) appeared... Then I never looked back.

MPW (Macintosh Programmer's workshop) was pretty awesome, if slow as hell -- Turbo Pascal was a lot better to work with -- the only issue is that it 'tokenized' your source code, so it wasn't plaint text anymore...

I still miss these 'one pass' compilers; I think it peaked with MetroWerks toolchain (which kept a Pascal plugin for a long time!) that was IMO the best compiler/linker/debugger toolset ever made.

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At work we're maintaining a rather big software written in C (not that much, <1M loc).

It's a bit odd: there's no brackets at all (only BEGIN and END), and the majority of names (functions and variables) are 6 characters long.

Guess what, it's was ported from Pascal. There's a '#define BEGIN {' in a header.

Didn't editors have search-replace back then? Although I can understand this if the developers hated C and was forced to port against their will.

They were not forced, it was their choice, and the choosen editor (vs6) do have search/replace. My personal guess is that keeping those BEGIN/END was seen as a smart move.

I guess they just liked the way it looked & felt? Really doesn't seem to make a difference to the development other than it feeling more familiar to Pascal devs.

It doesn't harm the development, indeed. However it does harm the developer's freedom in choosing his tools, for example Vim will try to fold regions delimited by brackets in C files. Nothing unbearable in the end.

So why not fix it?

You know why: some organizations are simply not meant to be fixed. People get hurt for silly reasons and one may not want to hurt the wrong people.

Pascal was a brilliant intro language, but Turbo Pascal IDE – at least for me – made it unbearable (yellow on blue...). It was a bliss when I switched to Visual Studio and C.

However, MPW still holds one of my best programming experiences: I discovered it quite late, on an iBook, shortly before Xcode introduction. On MPW I wrote a simple cli math calculator, where you type your full equation like in a notebook – implementing an array walk with pseudo-regex. MPW was simple enough and clear enough that it was the first moment I thought I could really handle coding.

Frankly, I really miss the Turbo Debugger. The TUI mode of GDB is nowhere near the clarity of the plain old TD. There were some efforts like cgdb but that's not it either.

>made it unbearable (yellow on blue...)

I take you are not color blind (I never considered it bad at any rate). Also it was configurable, iirc

I actually am red-green colorblind – in the dot test, I see the dots are red and green, but I don't see the number in the picture. I just hated how TP looks.

No it wasn't. In fact most Mac apps in the 80's after 1984 were written in C. All three of ours from 85 - 94 were in C. We were early adopters of LightspeedC and then later Corewarrior. MPW was a waste of time.

I still bemoan the death of CodeWarrior as a Mac IDE.

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