Pascal

Niklaus Wirth has passed away! A true giant of the field, he’s already missed. I don’t have much to add to the other obituaries and remembrances out there, but: perhaps an anecdote.

Like a lot of Gen-X programmers, Pascal was the first “real” programming language I learned in school. (I’m probably one of the youngest people out there to have gotten all three “classic” educational programming languages in school: Pascal, Logo, and BASIC). This was at the tail end of Pascal’s reign as a learning language, and past the point where it was considered a legitimate language for real work. (I missed the heyday of Turbo Pascal and the Mac Classic.). Mostly, we looked forward to learning C.

Flash forward a bit. Early in my career, I got a job as a Delphi programmer. Delphi was the pokeman-style final evolution of Borland’s Turbo Pascal, incorporating the Object Pascal Wirth worked out with Apple for the early Mac, along with Borland’s UI design tools. But under the object-oriented extensions and forms, it was “just” Pascal.

The job in question was actually half-and-half Delphi and C. The product had two parts: a Windows desktop app, and an attached device that ran the C programs on an embedded microcontroller.

For years, whenever this job came up in interviews or what have you, I always focused on the C part of the work. Mostly this was practical—focus on the language thats still a going concern, move past the dead one with a joke without dwelling on it. But also, I had a couple of solid interview stories based on the wacky behavior of C with semi-custom compilers on highly-constrained embedded hardware.

I don’t have any good stories about the Delphi part of the job. Because it was easy.

I probably wrote as much code in Delphi as C in that job, and in all honesty, the Delphi code was doing harder, more complex stuff. But the C parts were hard; I probably spent three times as much time to write the same number of lines of code.

Delphi, on the other hand, was probably the nicest programming environment I’ve ever used. It was a joy to use everyday, and no matter how goofy a feature I was trying to add, the language always made it possible. Some of that was Borland’s special sauce, but mostly that was Wirth’s Pascal, getting the job done.

These days, I’m not sure you could convince me to go back to C, but I’d go back to Delphi in a hot second. Thanks, Professor Wirth. You made younger me’s life much easier, and I appreciate it.