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

by AlexeyBrin • 2 years ago

119 103 2 years ago

sgbeal3• 2 years ago

Too soon :`(!

Ah, those were the days! TP v4, v5, v6... i'd graduated to C by the time 7 came out.

That almost nobody has the skills these days to implement something like TP is something we could eventually come to regret – or, rather, our grandchildren could. Software development is becoming a semi-skilled industry, and I doubt that the rise of AI will entirely compensate for this.

If anything, the rise (read as: shoving-down-our-throats) of AI/machine learning will hurt the collective ability to code, rather than compensate for it in the least. So many modern developers take pride in using their CoPilots and related AI/machine-learning tools to assist in coding, all the while ignoring that such usage actively keeps them from improving their own coding skills, in the same way that copying a classmate's test answers might let the copier pass the test without actually teaching them anything.

When that day comes that AI can pump out a complete, working, bug-free application based on natural-language descriptions, we will have lost the ability to code entirely, as any code such a thing generates will never be maintainable by a mere human being.

_Sigh_.

Well, it'll be fun while it lasts. The Machines can pry my makefiles and C compiler from my cold dead fingers.

PS: _GET OFF MY LAWN!_

happycube• 2 years ago

heh... IMO AI often works better when you ask it "how do/can I?" instead of "do this for me!"

weinzierl• 2 years ago

"Ah, those were the days! TP v4, v5, v6... i'd graduated to C by the time 7 came out."

Mee too, and it is painful to realize how much ahead of its time the IDE was. I am talking about the TUI version and yet:

- It already supported a dual monitor setup - one monitor for the IDE, one for the app - live debugging was a charm.

- The debugger had everything current debuggers have, but it was fully IDE integrated - no messin' with GDB or JDWP.

- The context sensitive help was the best, I never encountered a better one. I think a large part of it was that it really was context sensitive and it tried to solve the problem at hand, regardless if it was caused by the IDE or the language.

epolanski3• 2 years ago

all the while ignoring that such usage actively keeps them from improving their own coding skills

That's an opinion not a fact backed by any data.

In fact it feels like "you hurt your hacking skills by using an IDE rather than a simple text editor, or higher level language than assembly, or managing your memory manually rather than using GCs".

Also, maybe coding skills will become more and more irrelevant for most developers the same way knowing how memory or CPUs work is largely irrelevant for all but a tiny part of the industry.

In fact, if AI assistants will keep getting better, the best skills to have will be ability to direct those assistants and overseeing their output while meeting business and product needs.

sgbeal3• 2 years ago

That's an opinion not a fact backed by any data.

It's a well-demonstrated fact that, for the overwhelmingly large majority of people (mainly those without eidetic memory), copying someone else's answers, rather than coming up with them by applying one's own problem-solving skills, hurts one's ability to advance their own related knowledge/skills. There's a _reason_ we're taught not to cheat in school.

jebarker3• 2 years ago

the same way knowing how memory or CPUs work is largely irrelevant for all but a tiny part of the industry.

This is not true. A large part of the industry just _thinks_ these things aren't relevant to them and that's why we have such terrible software everywhere.

kccqzy3• 2 years ago

the rise (read as: shoving-down-our-throats) of AI/machine learning will hurt the collective ability to code

You sound like Socrates lamenting that the invention of writing is hurting people's collective ability to think, since their brains no longer need to hold many things simultaneously.

sgbeal3• 2 years ago

... writing is hurting people's collective ability to think

There's a tremendous difference between writing and having someone else write for you.

mikewarot• 2 years ago

i'd graduated to C by the time 7 came out.

I've never seen C as an improvement. Macros encourage all too clever code that's impossible to parse at first glance. The string handling is horrible. The fact that there are multiple contradictory ways to express pointers.

The only thing holding Free Pascal/Lazarus back is the documentation. There's no way to work on a small part of it, Wiki style, so it's always going to be an albatross. The auto-generated descriptions of variables used in library function calls just don't work as proper documentation.

On the plus side, it's fast and has all of the linking built in. You can stuff gigabytes of binary in strings and never have to allocate anything. It does object oriented stuff, generics, is strongly typed. It can spit out code for almost any platform, including WASM, Android, etc.

ASalazarMX3• 2 years ago

I was about to offer them my condolences for the downgrade :P

PaulHoule• 2 years ago

Turbo Pascal was by far my favorite programming language in the 1980s. I switched to C reluctantly in college because it was portable to the 32-bit Sun workstations we had, then I was a Linux Zealot for a decade or so so I never jumped in the Delphi (sequel to TP) train.

In the early 1980s there was a push for “anything but BASIC” for teaching languages. Before TP, in my mind PASCAL had the stink of failure between the watching-protons-decay slowness of UCSD Pascal and the inadequacy of ISO Pascal to do anything but solve leetcode problems.

C on the other hand accomplished what PL/I had set out to do in a “worse is better” way. TP added enough of what ISO Pascal was lacking to be fine for systems and applications work like C but it was saner, didn’t have the null terminated strings which made strcpy() + a later return Turing complete in C.

TP felt just a little more disciplined than C, like a pop version of Ada.

greenthrow5• 2 years ago

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.

barrkel2• 2 years ago

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.

greenthrow5• 2 years ago

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.

overanalytcl3• 2 years ago

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.

snozolli• 2 years ago

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.

mark-r2• 2 years ago

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.

barrkel2• 2 years ago

It did this using highly-optimized code, written in assembly language, by very skilled people.

"People" here meaning Anders Hejlsberg almost single-handedly.

speed_spread3• 2 years ago

Anders Hejlsberg, also of C# and Typescript fame. Oh, how I wish we had a RAD Delphi-like IDE for the web.

lproven3• 2 years ago

RAD Delphi-like IDE

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

for the web.

... why?

overanalytcl3• 2 years ago

So... RadPHP?

eegufer3• 2 years ago

You might try Codux...

raverbashing• 2 years ago

It's funny how Denmark could produce two computer scientists with very distinct opinions on what makes a computer language good (I'm happy ate least one of them knows the right answer)

Flow• 2 years ago

Who is the other one?

peutetre• 2 years ago

So what happened to Turbo Pascal? Three things, at least, contributed to its eventual downfall

The fourth thing is that it lives on as Delphi:

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi

And there's Free Pascal and Lazarus. One of the goals of Free Pascal is to be Turbo Pascal and Delphi compatible:

https://www.freepascal.org/

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

eps• 2 years ago

it lives on as Delphi

Regrettably, Delphi is closer to a zombie now than to something that's alive.

eegufer3• 2 years ago

Its true. I think the brain drain has had a severe impact on the evolution of the language as it exists in Delphi. However, some implementations, such as Oxygene, appear to evolve rapidly.

netsharc• 2 years ago

You mentioning Delphi reminds me of the Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, a large model railroad with a day/night cycle, cars driving on the roads and planes "landing" and "taking off", a lot of it controlled with Delphi: https://www.embarcadero.com/case-study/miniatur-wunderland-c...

A video of their control center with English subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9SGsxauu7o

ghosty141• 2 years ago

I dont even want to imagine how that codebase looks. The delphi code I‘ve come into contact with (not a delphi dev myself but worked close to them) tended to be quite bad by modern standards. The reason why was generally similar: not very experienced devs in the 90s needed to something with a UI off the ground.

fortran772• 2 years ago

It also lives on as .NET and C#, at least a little bit.

eegufer3• 2 years ago

and Typescript....

speed_spread3• 2 years ago

The article ends with an unwarranted jab at "bloated Java apps". If anything, Java nowadays is like Turbo Pascal back then, striking a reasonable compromise between complexity, readability and performance when compared to Electron apps.

lproven3• 2 years ago

Yeah, I thought much the same as that.

Java: bloated behemoth, destroying efficient native apps. Javscript: neat little thing for scripting web pages.

[Fast forward 30y]

Java: neat little thing, near native.

Javascript: bloated behemoth, destroying native apps.

bbarn2• 2 years ago

Was TP for Windows considered TP7? I spent my youth in Turbo Pascal 7 writing graphics based apps in DOS and never even know they made a Windows version. Not that my 286 could run Windows.

playingalong• 2 years ago

286 likely could run at least Windows 3.0 (and you could play minesweeper).

InfamousRece• 2 years ago

It could also run Windows 3.1, but could not run the most famous Windows of all time (3.11 for workgroups).

bbarn2• 2 years ago

If memory serves, RAM was my reason why I couldn't. Not so easy to upgrade as it is today. I tried it once or twice, using some HDD utility at the time that partitioned off some space for RAM like a modern day swap file.. and it did not go well.

minkles2• 2 years ago

I really do miss the days I was locked in an office with no internet connection with a free coffee machine and could be productive. Things were small, understandable and had documentation on paper.

coliveira• 2 years ago

Yes, the best time to be a programmer. I remember being several hours doing productive programming. Nowadays you cannot spend a few minutes without having to search for some information that is not available locally.

greenthrow5• 2 years ago

What? You are much more likely today to have shorter interruptions to productivity because it's so much quicker to search Google or whatever for answers than to get up from your desk and ask the office greybeard or consult paper books or worst case have to actually fiddle around until you just figure out some possibly undocumented behavior in some library you're trying to use.

If you were actually a professional programmer in pre-internet days (as I was) I don't think you would have any nostalgia for it.

__MatrixMan__• 2 years ago

Is it possible that the information you need is available locally via interactive help functionality, but the attention harvesting complex that is the modern web has tricked you into habitually reaching for a browser when calling the help function or reading the code would do?

Asked because it's gotten me a few times.

kyriakos• 2 years ago

everytime i code i feel like i need to complete side quests. you find one problem and the solution online requires to solve another 2 problems and so on. add to that the fact that our brain can't help and get distracted, by the time you finish the side quests you need time to remember what brought you there in the first place.

greenthrow5• 2 years ago

I have my doubts you were around in those days, because believe me, on average people were no more productive and certainly code quality was lower.

digitalsankhara2• 2 years ago

For you maybe, otherwise a very broad sweeping statement.

codr72• 2 years ago

No more productive as in banging keys per second maybe.

But there's something valuable in figuring stuff out by yourself, I wouldn't trade that experience for anything.

minkles2• 2 years ago

I was indeed around then. I built a fair few non trivial things on MSDOS and Windows with MASM 6, PDS7, VB3/4 and MSVC++. All offline. Mostly on airgapped networks. That and enbedded stuff with various tool chains.

We were definitely more productive. An order of magnitude more. As long as you picked appropriate tools. For example, I wrote a whole statistical analysis package in month (VB4). An ERP package in 6 months (access).

Code quality, which is difficult to objectively measure, was not really a problem.

Today I can barely even find a consistent UI toolkit which doesn’t fall to pieces, doesn’t require a server to run and doesn’t pull in 200 meg of untrusted JavaScript.

devsatish• 2 years ago

back in the day , started my first job as intern (VC++ dev) and I was so excited to get a stack of MSDN CDs for reference.

markus_zhang3• 2 years ago

I wish I have such a job, maybe some manuals too. Ah...

digitalsankhara2• 2 years ago

I spent a fair bit of my career in that sort of environment writing embedded software on MSDOS. Have fond memories of that but I wonder if I re-created that today would I be able to mentally cope? Might be the technology equivalent of becoming a monk in remote Tibet with the same needed commitment and rewards.

A younger self used to look forward to the latest (paper) shareware catalogue arriving by (snail) mail, posting back the order form and waiting for the floppies to arrive. True story :-)

markus_zhang3• 2 years ago

I miss that too. Where can I find such jobs in Canada? I don't care too much about pay as programming usually gets paid well enough.

samuell2• 2 years ago

One of the few places these kinds of jobs still exist is within the universities, in various labs or research cores. Pay is often lower, but quality of life and work often way higher, with much more freedom under responsibility.

ksec• 2 years ago

But who needs a Turbo Pascal, when you have 128Gb of RAM attached to an 5GHz CPU, for a hastily-written, bloated Java program to burn?

I mean we are in 2024 and should be well past the Java joke. Not only is modern Java seriously fast and could be efficient as well as natively compiled with Graal. ( Where 20 years ago GCJ was experimental at best ). The modern equivalent should really be Electron.

But back on the topic, I really miss Pascal and Delphi.

Varriount• 2 years ago

At least with Java you can select a GC which is more aggressive in giving memory back to the system (Shenandoah and ZGC). With Electron/Node you don't even get that (not to mention the fact Electron apps always spawn multiple processes).

anta403• 2 years ago

The "Java resource hog" is still a thing...in a few areas.

As an Android dev, I still see complaints (most likely by beginners) saying how Android Studio consumes much RAM and asking if it's possible to replace it with.. VSCode. I still remember doing Android development using Eclipse on a 2 GB PC and it was reasonably okay-ish. Of course it's practically impossible to use Android Studio on such machine. 8 GB is bare minimum.

eklavya• 2 years ago

"resource hog" is a thing. Eclipse is java as well.

layer8• 2 years ago

There are still aspects where Java is lacking: JVM startup time and memory usage. While you can work around the former with Graal native images, this messes with dynamic loading of classes and with reflection, which means you can’t do it for any random Java application or library.

anta403• 2 years ago

I also started learning programming in high school days (2001 - 2004) using TP 7. Fast, affordable internet connection wasn't pretty common on those days, so have to rely on internet cafes and books/magazies.

As the name implies, it's indeed TURBO. I mean, to achive similar snapiness when running Eclipse or VS, you'll need pretty powerful machine.

The legacy is carried on by Free Pascal folks (there's the text based IDE). I only use this for fun/nostalgia purpose. For actual work, well there's Lazarus IDE.

underseacables• 2 years ago

Borland C++ was the most desired software when I was a kid among my friends. We tried like hell to pirate it. This brings back memories.

mark-r2• 2 years ago

If you couldn't afford Borland products, you were poor indeed.

vintagedave• 2 years ago

The familiar ‘green tick button’ was an OWL enhancement, which graced so many Windows applications that it eventually became an irritating cliche.

Fun fact: this lived on in Delphi, TP's successor. The TBitBtn component, a button with an image and one of the oldest Delphi components (probably from Delphi 1?), has a Kind property that auto-sets all sorts of glyphs; Kind := bkOk sets it to a green check.

About a year ago the glyph was updated to look a little more modern :) But it lives on. I love occasionally seeing it on apps in the wild.

matwood• 2 years ago

This brought back memories. Pascal was what was taught in my first intro to programming class so many years ago.

CoastalCoder2• 2 years ago

I'm curious why we don't see more TUIs like Borland's. I.e., menu bar at the top, multiple panes (IIRC), etc.

For software like neovim and gdb, it could help a lot with discoverability.

anthk• 2 years ago

fp-ide from FreePascal, XWPE, gdb -tui...

CoastalCoder2• 2 years ago

But gdb tui doesn't have menus, does it?

The missing TurboPascal-like menus are the main thing I was trying to point out.

nurbl• 2 years ago

Visidata is a relatively modern example.

mananaysiempre2• 2 years ago

But what really made TP 7 special was its CP/M heritage. Turbo Pascal came to Windows by way of CP/M and MSDOS, which meant it had a compiler core that was designed to run with tight memory and a comparatively slow CPU. In the days when most compilers had to write a stack of intermediate files on disk, TP just constructed everything in memory. [...] It doesn’t matter much today if your compiler spits out a heap of temporary files, because disk storage is fast and cheap. But in the days of the floppy disk, you had to minimize disk access. Unfortunately, you also had to minimize memory use, because there wasn’t much of that, either.

Of course, the “heap of temporary files” is itself originally an adaptation for low main memory. The genius of Turbo Pascal is exactly that on those early PCs main memory was large enough / mass storage was small enough that for the program sizes in question the architecture of many passes communicating via disk files just wasn’t worth it. As far as I know, that was never true on minicomputers that our compiler tech was born on, and it’s very much not true on PCs now. (Consider: DOS machines had 100s of K to perhaps 4M of RAM and a couple megs to several dozen megs of floppy or disk, amounting to a proportion of perhaps 1:20. The laptop I’m typing this on has 4×10¹² bytes of mass storage and 64G bytes of RAM, a ratio of about 1:60, and I specifically made sure to get an abnormally large amount of RAM.)

renewedrebecca2• 2 years ago

You’ve got to wonder though: why in the world do we need that much memory?

mananaysiempre2• 2 years ago

I mean, I know why I got that much—I really value the ability to load up a ~20GB dataset into Pandas or pipe it through AWK for a one-off (or ten-off) task and just not worry about the particulars. Running `make -j16` and having the system stay usable while the compiler chews through the hundreds of KLOC of (admittedly very... vertical-looking) C and C++ is also appreciated. Also, memory modules are cheap and I feel stupid paying the markup for basically the same ICs soldered down, and once I had the slots available, well, as I said, memory modules are cheap.

More generally, though, screens and syntax trees.

First, a laptop screen that an 19th century book printer wouldn’t call an atrocity against the art (say 200ppi and above), at 32 bpp, takes ~16 MB for a single framebuffer. At 60 Hz, that means your display panel interface is already pushing 750 MB/s of useful data (and I’m ignoring all the legacy cruft like overscan and vblank). Unsurprisingly, the GPU that does all that, for multiple layers, in floating point (so 96 or 128 bpp), is heavily pipelined. Feeding that pipeline adequately and without heroics means at least a length-3 swapchain, so already you have 48 MB of screen buffers for any full-screen app that you don’t need to wait to redraw after you switch to it (remember when we needed to do that?). If said app is showing something large and scrollable, and you count on being able to see the thing you’re scrolling (remember when you couldn’t? thank touch input for killing that), that’s probably also, what, three, four screens’ worth of prerendered tiles? And now we’re already pushing a hundred megs—just for the pixels. How many browser tabs do you have open? (Personally, I get really irritated when my browser gets an attention deficit and doesn’t immediately show me the tab after I click on it.) Or thousand-page PDF specs?

(I was recently installing an old version of Windows in QEMU, and the installer showed me the installation wizard’s window—with all the text and controls—first and then spent multiple seconds blitting a purely frivolous graphic of a computer with installation disks around it onto the left pane. I didn’t remember computers used to do that! At least until you got around to installing the graphics driver, anyway, I guess.)

Second, I’ve been mulling over a Web browser’s job, and I can’t help but conclude that it’s really bloody awful.

The existence of the mutable DOM means it has to maintain a full-fat syntax tree for all the HTML—a humongous soup of pointers in a 64-bit address space (so in modern browsers they are hand-rolled 32-bit not-really-pointers). On top of that it needs to have an acceleration structure for style recomputation accessed on the critical user interaction path (because :hover), as well as a layout tree with line boxes supporting dynamic Unicode- (even BiDi-) aware line breaking and perhaps even hyphenation on resize, and none of that should fall over if you load up War and Peace in the original Russian+French with the paragraph breaks deleted.

It’s old compiler lore that no syntax tree will be as compact as the source code it was constructed from. Browsers sound like the bottommost circle of syntax tree hell even more than a general GUI has to be. The situation is probably salvageable with a flattened representation like the one Jetpack Compose uses and differential execution[1] used before it. But it’s definitely a lot of work, and to my admittedly cursory knowledge noöne’s really working on it.

(This part inspired by the urge to clutch my pearls that I felt while watching Andreas Kling’s Ladybird videos—there’s a lot of very thicc pointer soup in there, and I don’t think it’s possible to morph it into something saner in a continuous fashion. But then I thought about the problem, and yeah, the problem sucks.)

So all in all I think single-digit gigs sound about fair, I think, and that’s how much my system typically shows when I’m not deliberately running heavy stuff on it.

(For what it’s worth, I once spent weeks cramming all data required for Unicode normalization into about 20K. It’s certainly possible, but as it turns out, three iterations of fetch-shift-popcount for every character is slow. Not “why do I need to wait for my computer” slow, but definitely “why does my computer’s SSD have to wait for its CPU” slow.)

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4445656/what-is-differen...

ASalazarMX3• 2 years ago

Just like porn advanced web technologies, videogames advanced PC hardware. Don't believe anyone who tells you that porn and videogames are useless, they were the recreative equivalent of the Apollo Program.

praptak• 2 years ago

I definitely miss hitting F5 and instantly seeing the output my program compiled with the change that I just made.

acdha• 2 years ago

That’s what modern web development is like as long as you’re not using something like Next/React with a massive build process.

renewedrebecca2• 2 years ago

Which unfortunately, is what modern web development is.

ofrzeta• 2 years ago

Many stacks offer hot code reloading. I am not a dedicated frontend developer but I used to work on a Vue 3 frontend for a project and it was actually quite nice to have the dev service watch the files and the browser hot reload the page when I changed code in the editor. It's not all bad.

marcodiego• 2 years ago

The builtin help in Borland IDE's was supreme. I used to everyday choose a random help page, read it, copy the example and modify it until I understood what it did. That's probably the best programming tutor I ever had and how I learned programming by myself in my teens without Internet.

stuaxo2• 2 years ago

This, and the help in QuickBasic has not been beaten for how instant they were.

Hit F1 on some bit of code and instantly see help on the keyword, very quickly find stuff via the index etc.

GeoAtreides• 2 years ago

The help in QBasic/TP made me the man I am today

danielovichdk2• 2 years ago

Whatever Anders Hejlsberg has done had been great. Really great.

impostervt• 2 years ago

Flashbacks to high school CS back in the 90s. Started with basic then moved on to this. I understand now they use Java to teach kids, and I can't imagine trying to learn to code with that language.

fortran772• 2 years ago

This was the first easy way to write Windows software. Our company had develped software to send pages to Motorola pages via the dial-up interface provided by most pager providers in TPW 1.5/ TP 7

stuaxo2• 2 years ago

Let's work out whose intellectual property it is and see if they will license it as MIT.

Microsoft has shown MIT to be a good standard under which to license retro software from DOS to Windows file manager.

ape4• 2 years ago

Its so successful and nice that Microsoft poached the good employees. Article from 1997 https://www.zdnet.com/article/borland-sues-ms-over-staff-poa...

Someone• 2 years ago

FTA: “That almost nobody has the skills these days to implement something like TP”

I don’t think that’s true. Percentage-wise, the number may have dropped, but there are many more programmers now than there were back then.

I even am not convinced that percentage is lower today. There are plenty of people in the demo scene who, if incentivized, could write something like it.

You also have to realize that TP 7 is relatively simple compared to today’s development environments. To mention a few items:

- pascal is a lot easier for an IDE than C

- no messing with character encodings

- the editor may be fast, but does it stay fast when confronted with very large files?

- TP need not be cross-platform

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

Related Stories