They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pascal 7

Re:They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pas... by greenthrow on Saturday August 24, 2024 @08:14AM (#41337621)

I was around back then and there is a lot of nonsense in this article. The biggest one being overstating Turbo Pascal's role in Windows' adoption. Nobody cared what tools programmers used back then. MS-DOS dominated and Windows dominated because they were the OS that came on IBM compatible PCs. And that platform was by far the dominant hardware platform at the time. All the software users wanted was on MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 was backwards compatible with MS-DOS. Etc. Etc. (And while some of that software was written in Pascal, most of it was not.)

Pascal at that time was like Ruby or something is today. Definitely widely used but a far distant to the incredibly dominant C. There's no way to explain to folks today how dominant C was back then. If you were a software engineer learning C was just a given. You may or may not have bothered with BASIC, you may or may not be comfortable getting down to Assembly, but if you were serious about coding, you knew C.

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Re:They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pas... by barrkel on Saturday August 24, 2024 @08:28AM (#41337725)

The new hotness was C++. Object orientation was the AI of its day. TP jumped on it so fast with 5.5 it ended up throwing away that object model for Delphi a few years later.

TP had little impact on Windows, I agree. TP was for a particular niche, small software shops targeting DOS. And it was a big success, it paid for a nice building in Scotts Valley, but it also fuelled the ambitions of a bunch of executives who got derailed, getting into databases, a multi-pronged bet (Paradox, dBASE, Interbase) that didn't really pay off.

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Re:They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pas... by overanalytcl on Saturday August 24, 2024 @08:56AM (#41337950)

Don't forget about the time Borland really thought they could outsmart Microsoft on .NET and gave us the wonderfully horrible Delphi 8. To put it into a metaphor, Delphi 7 was like XP, Delphi 8 was like Vista. People still use D7 while Borland and Embarcadero wants to forget they ever tried D8 (and Delphi Prism which is just rebranded Oxygene).

And at about the same time they also tried doing a native Delphi for Linux, which was so bad they pulled out after 3 versions and never tried Linux again until recently (and even then, you can only cross-compile, you can't run Delphi 12 on Linux or macOS).

And they also tried getting into the VCS sphere with StarTeam (which somehow still received updates well into 2017... Despite it being made in 1995). I don't know why OpenText decided to buy it in 2023.

Let's not forget about Turbo Prolog and the time they almost did a Turbo Modula-2, but it was actually published by TopSpeed and now lives in Clarion. Ugh.

Borland... Err, Inprise... Err, Embarcadero... Or CodeGear? Or Idera? Who keeps count? Anyway, that switched so many hands it's sad to see. They were doing way too much. A lot of bad decisions made them less and less popular (not like their current greed is helping their case). Oh well. Long live Free Pascal.

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Re:They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pas... by greenthrow on Saturday August 24, 2024 @08:37AM (#41337791)

One place I worked in the 90s had a bunch of meetings/tutorials to try to sell all the C programmers on Object Oriented Programming in general and C++ in particular -- the software in question was super complicated and massive and IMHO could have benefitted from some judicious application of OOP concepts like separation of concerns -- but it got caught in a rut of just constantly trying to explain OOP to middle aged programmers who had only ever written and thought in imperitive code.

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Re:They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pas... by snozolli on Saturday August 24, 2024 @09:34AM (#41338204)

if you were serious about coding, you knew C.

I think this is fundamentally the same toxic thinking that is still with us today.

C offered no actual advantages over Turbo Pascal for DOS/Windows programming. I'm sure one can come up with platforms or releases that weren't supported by TP, since C was the defacto standard. Regardless, they're fundamentally equivalent.

Meanwhile, Turbo Pascal was blazingly fast compared to C. The C linker in particular used to take forever. Turbo Pascal was seen as a toy language. My AP Computer Science exam results were disregarded by colleges because it was in Pascal.

A few years later, I was a C++ snob and looked down on Visual Basic "macro hackers". Meanwhile, at least one true genius electrical engineer I worked with would rapidly prototype software in VB that would take me weeks to replicate in C++.

There's a weird disdain in software development for approachable, efficient tools that create actual business value.

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Re:They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pas... by mark-r on Saturday August 24, 2024 @10:17AM (#41338490)

Pascal with its tight type safety made certain things extra hard, like working with images. C on the other hand let you walk all over it. Pascal was very much my preferred language until I learned C - then I never looked back.

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