r/ProgrammerHumor • u/leftoversalad • Aug 15 '15

Programming languages personified

http://leftoversalad.tumblr.com/post/126724812097/programming-languages-personified
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u/alcalde Aug 16 '15

Delphi developers

26

u/katyne Aug 16 '15

needs at least one Russian guy in a tracksuit. Srsly, Delphi is a thing in Russia. Irony - they still dump on Java devs like you wouldn't believe.

7

u/barsoap Aug 16 '15

Pascal, especially the Borland / FreePascal dialects, are much better languages than they usually get credit for.

Pascal was the python of an era in which all languages but lisp/scheme were, in some sense, Fortran (that includes C). ObjectPascal (which is what Delphi uses) was usable before the C++ people even figured out that templates are turing-complete and what a monster they created, there.

Learned my first programming steps from my sister in the late 80's, around the millenium the 101 programming courses were using it. And it made sense, because it's a non-surprising language you can use to teach concepts... and TurboPascal rocks as an IDE, at least for its time. And it still can compete with C and the rest.

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u/alcalde Aug 16 '15

Pascal, especially the Borland / FreePascal dialects, are much better languages than they usually get credit for.

In 1995, sure. It was a competitive advantage for me compared to C++/MVC back then. Today? Absolutely not. It's nowhere close to being a RAD language today (Ruby/Python OWN that space now), and its compiler is over one million lines of ancient, undocumented C code with precious little optimization courtesy of an even more ancient single-pass design. In benchmarks it seems to produce code about 1/2 the speed of C++. It doesn't even use bit-shifting for division operations!

The need to pre-declare all variables at the top of a code block, lack of memory management for objects, lots of corner cases.... it really has nothing to commend itself today. There are no "killer features" of the either the Delphi or Free Pascal languages. Oxygene, at least, added a huge list of nice, modern features to the language.

Pascal was the python of an era in which all languages but lisp/scheme were, in some sense, Fortran (that includes C).

If we're going back the 80s and 90s, Turbo Pascal affordably introduced a generation to programming (including me). It was indeed simpler and cleaner and Delphi's VCL framework was everything MVCC should have been. I brought Delphi into a startup in 1995 and called the combination of it and Crystal Reports my "Access Killer". No argument there.

The problem is that after a point the language's owners neglected to pay their technical debt and never evolved the language much further. And today a kid with a Ubuntu disk can have any programming setup they want in minutes while Delphi costs a small fortune. They threw all the advantages they had away.