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Comment by sspiff | Hacker News Reader

There's still a small-ish community working on and building new things with FreePascal.

I may not be a Pascal fan but still I’m delighted to learn this.

Same for me. After using Basic on ZX Spectrum, Pascal was the first evolved programming language I've learned. And, at it's time, it was quite good.

Alive, kicking, and actually supported by some decent cooling.

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Pascal is certainly not dead, at least some friends who are Delphi folks use it both for work and side projects.

On the other side... not sure how many newbies learn Pascal these days, though.

Some people learn Latin and it’s used for naming organisms. Still a dead language.

Not by OPs definition.

You also wouldn't call the newer invented languages like Esperanto dead, and yet there's more people who know and can speak Latin (using one of the modern pronunciations)...

It is the official language of the Vatican. That isnt nothing and probably saves latin from formal dead status imho. And lots of military organizations use it for mottos. So someone is out there creating new sentences with it on a semi-regular basis.

Last I checked there were no people being born in Vatican nor had Latin as their first language, citizenship is only given based on the office you hold. It's pretty close to nothing, it's a corporate HQ with a language requirement.

Dead languages aren't those who aren't being spoken or used anymore, it's those that have no native speakers. It's not something that's in any way compatible with programming languages.

Latin has no first-language speakers, so that makes it a dead language by definition. That's different from being an extinct language, which means that it would have no first- or second-language speakers.

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

Classical languages like Latin are a bit of a special case - for instance new works and translations /imto/ Latin are still occasionally published (Hobbitus Ille for instance is stocked in certain bookstores here)

> It is the official language of the Vatican

For a second there I thought we were still talking about Pascal! I'd wager it should be...

Looking at the activity on the Free Pascal compiler[0] compared to some other, non-dead languages like Crystal[1], I would say Pascal isn't dead.

They had a major release to their most popular IDE just a few weeks ago[2].

A lot of these projects built with FP aren't as visible in the HN community, because they related to different hobbyist fields, aren't keystone components in the startup ecosystem etc. But they for sure exist.

[0] https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/activity [1] https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/activity [2] https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,65631.0...

The Castle Game engine is not mentioned often, but it looks pretty mature from the screenshots and has been in active development for many years. Most recent news update was a few weeks ago. I have not gotten around to try it yet. Only started playing around with FreePascal a bit last year after not having used Pascal at all for some 25 years.

https://castle-engine.io/

I was looking for this before when writing my reply to show as an example but forgot the name of the project, thanks!

Dead language has a very specific definition tho.

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