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Comment by aljgz | Hacker News Reader

I'm grateful that Pascal was the first language I learned, for an unexpected reason:

I was a natural fan boy. We just assume that the thing we happened to land on is for some reason the best. Pascal is the best, Windows is the best, my country is the best, etc, etc. I know people who lived like that their entire (up to this point) life.

If I happened to start with c++ or java, I could stay ignorant forever. I was lucky that Pascal's ecosystem was so limited that I needed to learn c++ and from there I went to java, c#, python, and a little bit of others.

Now, when looking back at Pascal, I have the deep nostalgic emotion, but I know that for most things I can do with it, there are much better tools out there.

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I've used a lot of languages both in hobby projects and professionally. I learned pascal in high school when I took the majority of what a lot of computer science departments teach in their first/second year of college. This is after learning C in middle school (this was late 80's early 90's) under the direction of my math teacher who thought I should learn something besides BASIC/assembly.

So, that said, looking back and trying to teach the current generation basic programming concepts beyond variables/loops/etc, aka data structures. I repeatedly think that my high school data structures/etc teachers did a far better job than the current crop trying to wedge more advanced computer science topics into languages like Java, python, C++ or even C. The replacements (Rust) are bad or worse for teaching these concepts because the language just simply gets in the way to much. C is maybe the best of the allowed choices because its possible to write say linked lists, or linked tree structures fairly easy but its got so many foot guns that Pascal manages to avoid. Languages like C++ might be reasonable, until some prof dictates that the class should be using std::unique_ptr() or whatever, which just adds confusion to something that should at its heart be fairly simple.

So in the end, I think Niklaus Wirth actually has a bit of an masterpiece in Pascal when it comes to creating a language for teaching computer science topics.

The fact that I also convinced the place I worked to use Delphi on a couple of greenfield projects in the mid 1990's and that was probably some of the most productive work I've ever done shows that pascal also works just fine in a commercial setting.

FWIW Oxford has some courses and they use Oberon because the entire language is 20 pages. so while pascal is great. it has been somewhat superseded.

You should try going back and taking all you have learned and applying it to modern pascal. You may find it a much more productive language than you remember.

Pascal has always been the most productive language (at least for native code without GC).

But it is lacking good libraries. Then I write everything myself, and then it does not even work, because it is lacking a good oss compiler.

I can identify with this comment a lot. It wasn't that it was great or any type of special technology, it's the memories of all the fun, struggles, and improvement it helped us find along the way.

My senior year in high school was the first year they had a programming class and it was Pascal. The very next year they instead started teaching C++.

As a consequence out of necessity a couple of years later I ended up self teaching myself PHP then Ruby then JS. These days I'm pretty proficient with it.

I had an easier time doing it because of those early concepts I learned with Pascal.

I often wonder what would have happened if I had learned C++ instead.

> I was a natural fan boy. We just assume that the thing we happened to land on is for some reason the best. Pascal is the best, Windows is the best, my country is the best, etc, etc.

Although I've had previous contacts with computers, my first personal computer was a windows box in the beginning of the second half of the 90's. Never had in my mind "windows is best".

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