347 karma · joined February 27, 2014
I don't get the argument. There are parts of Windows I don't like, so I have chosen a 3rd-party (often open-source) replacement. The exact same process as I do on Linux. I don't see why I have to switch to Linux to have that freedom.
(and to be honest, I don't care where the taskbar is)
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central has a built-in development environment with a language called AL. AL is a variant of Pascal.
A bit of background, Pascal was very popular in Denmark in the 80'ties and 90'ties (Turbo Pascal was created by a Dane, Anders Hejlsberg, later Delphi, c# and TypeScript fame). Business Central was a Danish piece of software created for IBM before Microsoft acquired it, so choosing Pascal as the base language was a very natural thing.
I got my first job because IBM needed Pascal developers for this new accounting system they got and I already knew Turbo Pascal.
Today the AL compiler is built on Roslyn (same as the c# compiler) and have a fully capable language server supporting all the fancy intellisence stuff in VS Code, also supported by GitHub CoPilot.
p.s. I even created my own AL compiler, written in AL https://www.hougaard.com/toolbox
Again, this is more a spoken language/culture thing, and this goes back to what premises we use to communicate with the machines, ours or the machines...
If you have 4 classes in school today, you would never talk about the 1st class as number 0, the last one is the 4th, not the 3rd.
The 0 makes a lot of sense in a C pointer world where memcpy and other alike functions can be written very thight.
The 1 makes a lot of sense in a human world, when we count, we start at 1, we talk about the "1st", counting on finger starts with 1, etc.
I once were at a Lua (1 indexed language) conference where this was discussed, and Luis started explaining why Lua was 1-index with this sentence: "The 1st argument ...." :)
Ups, no upload feature (yet) - That would make it much more usable.