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Comment by peterangular | Hacker News Reader

Pascal was a big part of my learning to program (Turbo Pascal). Current day opinion on Pascal is that it's a dead language without much of an ecosystem. It's just the harsh truth.

Lua ended up as a "DSL" in a ton of places for general scripting applications etc. When I say "DSL" I get that it's not, I'm just generalizing as to the type of solutions that I've personally seen Lua leveraged. With this sorta "Lua in random places" bit I feel lots of us have ran into it.

When comparing Pascal to Lua I would be more comfortable with Lua for a modern solution - I would posit that very little greenfield development is happening in Pascal. Lua continues to be present in-industry.

This entire comment is anecdotal and based on personal experience.

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Pascal became Object Pascal. Delphi is a dialect of Object Pascal and descendent of Turbo Pascal, and still here.

There are multiple compilers and IDEs that use Object Pascal such as Oxygene (RemObjects), Free Pascal/Lazarus, PascalABC (open-source on GitHub), Smart Pascal, DWScript, etc...

By the way, Object Pascal is mostly an extension of Pascal, so in many cases a Pascal programmer can transfer their code to the newer compilers/IDEs. Free Pascal/Lazarus even has a Turbo Pascal compatibility mode (in addition to Delphi compatibility mode).

Object Pascal is often ranked between #15 to #20 on TIOBE (and that's without counting some dialects). Lua is presently ranked #39. So if somebody is talking about popularity or who is the dead language, then they should be saying that about Lua, Rust, Julia, Kotlin, Haskell, etc... Those are all languages ranked far below Object Pascal.

> I would posit that very little greenfield development is happening in Pascal

This is a very good example of the importance of the power of branding - Pascal has actually continued to evolve over the past 50+ years, and even has a few ISO standards, but most don't know about it because of the name changes:

Pascal -> Clascal (Pascal with object oriented extensions) -> Object Pascal (more OOP extensions)

Clascal and Object Pascal were developed in consultation with the original developer of Pascal, Niklaus Emil Wirth, and Object Pascal enjoyed considerable commercial success with Apple, Microsoft and Borland. Niklaus Wirth however has a bad habit of changing the name of every evolution of Pascal he himself works on, and so we have:

Pascal -> Modula / Modula 2 -> Oberon (with extensions we also have Oberon 02 and Active Oberon)

Oberon is powerful even for system programming, and the creator himself used it to create a new OS with same name as the programming language (yet again showcasing that he has no concept of branding and marketing) - http://www.projectoberon.com/ .

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