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From CP newsletter
The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases • The Register[^]
Rambling article covering several things. (It really rambles.) Towards the top is the following statement.
"Pascal became Turbo Pascal which became Borland Delphi and drove the success of Microsoft Windows 3. Delphi was, for a while, huge. But Wirth ignored all that ..."
All I can say is that I have never see such a claim before nor does it jive with what I experienced.
Window 3 was driven by C and Basic. And probably quite a bit of assembler.
Pascal did not become Turbo Pascal. Turbo Pascal was just a product from one company. I note that the Tiobe index now lists Delphi and Pascal together but Delphi is a product and Pascal still remains a programming language distinct from that, because compilers still exist.
Delphi was released for Windows 3.1 (not 3) and wasn't anything but a niche language at the time. And continued as a niche language. Is also still exists.
It does seem that perhaps Pascal itself is a dead/abandoned language in that the last standard was released in the early 90s. That would suggest it is not really an active language anymore. While Delphi has had recent releases. Quick look suggested there is no standard for Delphi. For myself that tends to indicate it is more just a product (which at a minimum means it is only relevant to the adoption of that specific product.)
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Then after a lot of rambling the author gets to this bit.
"There is an urgent need for smaller, simpler software."
Err..no.
Complexity doesn't mean easy but simple doesn't deliver what complexity does.
Based on that argument then the Las Vegas Sphere should be torn down and replaced with shadow puppets backed by a fire created by rubbing sticks together. Certainly less complex. Absolutely not as much fun and that measured by many different criteria.
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I agree.
On point one, I'd say the "became" is used to mean "begat" or "led to".
On point two, I'd day that maybe a lot of people don't realize that software is like an ogre...
I mean software is like an iceberg, and they look only at the part they can see. This is fine in many cases, but they completely ignore the huge part which they can't see and treat it like it doesn't even exist at all. That only the little bit of code you actually write matters, and that any library, runtime, framework, or VM it sits atop is of no consequence. A particular application requires some amount of code, whatever you don't write yourself has to already exist beneath the surface.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: software is like an iceberg, and they look only at the part they can see.
Well said! Maybe that's why it is so common for many Johnny-come-lately to decide to re-implement something thinking it's going to be so much cleaner and nicer, only to discover that they need about the same amount of code and a lot of effort has been wasted for naught.
Mircea
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Delphi was one of many choices (including PC COBOL, FORTRAN, PL/I, Assembler, C). VB dominated because it was MS, and corporations bought PC's with MS operating systems. Delphi was the Beta to VB's VHS.
People who wanted native exe's (and performance), and didn't program in FoxPro, Paradox, Clipper, dBase, etc. used Delphi until finally forced to use (MS) C++ (and the horrors of MFC) to stay in (corporate) business ("JET" engine, ADO, record sets, SQL Server, etc.).
Delphi was (Windows) RAD when RAD was just a word. The overall impact is hard to quantify. I certainly thought it was better than anything out there at the time.
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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And Delphi (C++ Builder in my case) is still unique when it comes to 'visual inheritance' of TForm but also for inheritance TDataModule.
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C# was the first programming language for vacuum tube computers and eventually evolved into Fortran, now the defacto language for all server and web development.
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Marc Clifton wrote: vacuum tube computers
During the Hoover administration?
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1960's, was my first.
me: "I'm here to fix the computer"
cust: "I think it is one of those little light bulbs, that's what it was the last time".
>64
It’s weird being the same age as old people.
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Hi Marc, maybe you have that reversed.
The first successful compile of a Fortan program was in 1958 (see link below). The first successful compile of C# was in 1988 (see link below)
[^]
C Sharp (programming language) - Wikipedia[^]
I seem to remember Algol and Assembler being prevalent during the vacuum tube era.
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#include <humour.h>
It was a joke!
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Thank you for share with us.
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Oh (sounds of objects whistling over head).
Me gotta go sharpen stone axe now.
Someone left big black monolith blocking cave entrance.
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I hope it was a joke as the provided link contradicts “1988” in the first paragraph.
Quote: The C# programming language was designed by Anders Hejlsberg from Microsoft in 2000 and was later approved as an international standard by Ecma (ECMA-334) in 2002
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About 30 years ago Delphi (as part of RAD Studio) was a big thing in Windows development...
Probably the only true RAD at that time with the very impressive VCL...
I actually used it to write a POC for moving from DOS(COBOL) to Windows (as one who used Turbo Pascal to write my final project I had a soft spot for Pascal)...
But as we couldn't find people knowing Pascal we moved to VB... (something MS encouraged too)
Probably the most regrettable decisions we ever made...
"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." ― Gerald Weinberg
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I did love Delphi. It was not niche, but it was vastly different from Pascal. I had to modify a lot of code to be 2k compliant in Pascal, and it was hard.
In Delphi, we mucked with pointers and I might accidentally have killed a company by writing an article. It was my first article ever, not even on CodeProject.
Delphi meant RAD on Win32. It was quick like VB6, but you could do more. Of course I loved it, still do. You can downplay it, but that doesn't mean we didn't deliver a real time product. And by real time I do mean real time, it responded in less than 24 frames (and you shared a few ms with other stuff). On a non real time OS.
Our world was between VB6 with its ease, and C with its power. You can ridicule it all you want 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: It was not niche,
Not the best word choice on my part.
I meant that it was not used very much. Not that it was limited.
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I still have the book on Delphi 5 by Marco Cantu. Unfortunately did not go through it fully. Had to modify, enhance software tools related to a wind energy simulation software, which i believe is still in Delphi.
Same is the case with Jeff Prosise's MFC book. Which was also purchased around the same time, 2002/2003. Did not read it fully.
modified 14-Feb-24 22:10pm.
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Quote: "Pascal became Turbo Pascal which became Borland Delphi"
Ummm, not as I recall, Turbo Pascal was the Borland flavor of Pascal which only existed on PC's I had Pascal on the Amiga it was tight to the standard which Turbo took liberty's with you didn't have to have
Program Hello at the top or the horrible
Program Hello (INPUT/OUTPUT) for you Dos junkies as I recall it gave a new line with each { preventing K&R style. It also had Poke and Peek, I was there man,I saw things, horrible things 
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What is the smallest positive integer minus the largest negative integer?
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Infinity - if you're talking about real numbers.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Oh? Is -2 bigger than -1 now? 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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For sure: if I have -$2, I owe the bank more than if I had -$1. $2 is a larger number, indicating a larger debt.
------------------------------------------------
If you say that getting the money
is the most important thing
You will spend your life
completely wasting your time
You will be doing things
you don't like doing
In order to go on living
That is, to go on doing things
you don't like doing
Which is stupid.
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Well, considering the largest negative integer tends to infinity…
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