Interesting trivia fact... Anders Hejlsberg created the original Turbo Pascal, then went to work for Borland where he developed Delphi, then moved to Microsoft where he developed J++, C# and now TypeScript.

In an interview about C#, he said it was highly inspired by his work on Delphi ( thus the events and delegates system ), which in turn was inspired by Pascal.

So... if you want to work in modern Pascal, go with C#.


It's amazing the overwhelming influence a small number of people have over the programming landscape! Bjarne Stroustrup, Anders Hejlsberg, Donald Knuth, Edsger W. Dijkstra, Nikluas Worth, Alan Kay, Brian Kernighan, Dennis Richie, ummmm.... there's more, but not a ton. Its amazing that so many programming contributions came from so few people... and that their are so many vikings among that rarefied few.

You will be fine learning any language... well, probably Objective C is the weirdest one. If you learn Java or C# you will be able to deal with almost any other language out there, even the weak typed ones (i.e. Javascript, Actionscript 2 and PHP), and you'll be able to create structured code because Java and C# are pretty strict.

[quote name='Serapth' timestamp='1354636629' post='5007106']
Its amazing that so many programming contributions came from so few people

Not to burst the balloon or start a row but isn't it amazing that many are middle class, rich, white, straight men?
[/quote]

Not in the slightest actually.

For the Scandinavian contributors, they are a socialist largely homogeneous society, vis-à-vis the vast majority of people from that demographic are white and middle class.

In the US it's much the same for a different reason. In the US, this type of work is generally the realm of academia or post-academia, in which the prevailing demographic is both white and middle-upper class. Additionally, post-secondary schooling is provided by the state.

As to the straight comment, that is harder to quantify, one way or the other. Simply put, the information isn't generally available. As a field, although predominately male, sexual orientation has rarely been a huge focus, one way or the other. For one rather extreme example, Danielle Bunten Berry, author of MULE and Seven Cities of Gold had gender realignment surgery. There are plenty of openly gay programmers now, and some in that list may in fact be gay. Many of them are products of the 60-80s though, where coming out of the closet wasn't exactly the thing to do. Long story short, sexual orientation means so very little in the context of programming accomplishments, it simply isn't mentioned or generally relevant.

Pascal is a fine language for coding in. Before lobbying from Sun to use Java, it was the go-to language for pedagogical application (yes, pun intended). The original Macintosh Toolbox bindings were in Pascal, and when Microsoft copied them, the Windows bindings were written as if they were in Pascal.

You won't get a lot of community support, but there are enough fanatics out there you can probably get the help you need.

[quote name='game of thought' timestamp='1354628344' post='5007069']
the reason i chose to learn it is that it is structured, so i can improve my programs structure.

What do you mean by "structured" here compared to the other languages? Are you talking about enforced semantics and syntax? If so, go with Python.
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I wouldn't recommend python as a language to start in, rather start in C# or Java, let the compiler help you with finding errors, than having to guess why it isn't working. There is other things python will confuse a beginner with, where pascal is better for.

Pascal was originally designed to teach students how to use structured programming, Object pascal is an extension of this and is still in my mind the best language to teach someone how to program in. The syntax is clear and memory management is easy you create an class instance with it's "Create" method and get ride of it with "Destroy"(this is a virtual destructor) negating all the trouble you have with memory management in C and C++.

My High School computer science department used a custom variant of Pascal named Alice Pascal specifically for instruction.

It sucked, hard. Making me develop an unfair hatred of the Pascal language that took many years to shake. Learning tools that force you into a sandbox and dont let you out are evil and should go the way of the dodo.

I'm not hating on Pascal, just my experiences with a (variant) of it. Unless you went through high school in the Ontario school system quite a while ago, you probably never had to face this particular POS implementation.