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 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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