Comment by fayten | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fayten | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure Pascal entirely lost due to just C. Borland's Turbo Pascal was quite popular and was broadly used in the mid 80s. Apple even used their own Object Pascal variant through-out the 80s. Pascal was primarily used for application development and for this case it was leagues ahead of C and C++. Turbo Pascal thrived up until Delphi was released in 1995, which then became the new lead Pascal. Unfortunately, Delphi would come to face it's killer within a year.

When Java came out in 1996 it became an overnight juggernaut in application development. Java had a ton of hype when it was still in beta in 1995 and TIME magazine even listed it as one of the best products of the year--when it wasn't even released yet.

Microsoft poached Anders Hejlsberg, the primary language designer of Turbo Pascal and Delphi, from Borland in 1996 to have him work J++ their variant of Java. J++ followed the Sun Java spec with a few deviations, but it was just another testament to how quickly Java was taking over.

Borland was now competing with something that was free and they needed to pivot and well...they didn't.

Random articles for further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B

http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,9839...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8460037/list-of-delphi-l...

Very true, Borland didn't pivot, they found a buyer (Embarcadero) and the top executives got paid. Then Embarcadero had to get their money, so Delphi prices kept getting raised higher. Totally out of the price range of normal users or independent developers.

Arguably what saved Pascal/Object Pascal was the open-source projects of Free Pascal/Lazarus and PascalABC (popular in Russia). Plus there were huge fans of Turbo Pascal, who got it released as freeware, as Borland had switched to selling the Delphi IDE.

This combination (Free Pascal/Lazarus, freeware Turbo Pascal, PascalABC, etc...) of open-source freeware Pascal eventually put pressure on Embarcadero to release the free Delphi Community Edition (2018). That was 5 to 10 years late in the game. A lot of user base and previous strong fans had significantly diminished.

However, it does appear that Object Pascal has found a decent level, at presently between the top 15 to 20 programming languages (were it was between top 1 to 10 in the 80s and 90s). It is possible for Object Pascal to see a bit of a resurgence, based around the free open-source dialects of Pascal and Embarcadero's strong push to put Delphi in schools (example- Turkey bought 1 million licenses for their schools or South Africa replacing Java with Delphi).

> I'm not sure Pascal entirely lost due to just C. Borland's Turbo Pascal was quite popular

Look at which one is being used to this day to write essentially every modern operating system, and even the interpreters and compilers for other languages. JavaScript engines are written in C, not Pascal.

I think it obviously did lose, though judging from the moderation it clearly still has some fanatical followers.

Both Turbo Pascal and Object Pascal had so many extra non-standard and un-Pascal-like features that they were barely even the same language.

As I mentioned in another comment, allowing you to write bare assembly language inline wasn't exactly a feature of the original Wirth Pascal. The analogy I used at the time was that (Wirth) Pascal was like a pair of blunt-pointed kindergarten scissors, while C was more like a chainsaw. Borland added enough non-standard features to make it more like maybe a kitchen knife, but in the long run that still wasn't enough.

> JavaScript engines are written in C, not Pascal.

Which one? Unless you forgot to type ++.

To be fair, they are probably written in bad C++.

That's a little nit-picky, don't you think?

In any case, it's not inc(Pascal), now, is it?

> Pascal was primarily used for application development and for this case it was leagues ahead of C and C++.

On what basis do you say this? Was Turbo Pascal, say, leagues ahead of Turbo C?

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