My son and I were walking through a white elephant sale and he found a copy of Turbo Pascal for let's say $40, which was about two month's allowance at the time. So I arranged a loan (allowance advance) from the Bank of Dad.
He was maybe 10 or 11. Had a great time with it...
...and it helped fuel the interest he already had.
I'll bet the same $40 that if I ask him about it, he'll have the same fondness he has for Christopher Lampton's 1986 book, "How to Create Adventure Games," which was probably his first extensive look under the digital hood...
I was taught it 3 times. First in middle school when my friend and i were trying to make a 2d arcade shooter, then at high school and then again one the first year at the uni. The latter was in 2009(!!!).
It was popular in the '80s. By early '90s Visual Basic took over quickly bcuz of the popularity of Windows 3.0 and Turbo Pascal was quite late to produce a Windows version, with subpar GUI library. It didn't recover until it was replaced by Delphi in 1995.
Dude just name-drops stuff
He probs tries to sell an 'old-skool' engineer image
Only reason it was preferred as a learning language was because it forces declaring your variables, haven't encountered it much out in the wild beyond that
Not specifically, but you could learn it in the 80's/90's and it had some useful things it could do. Relatively low barrier to entry. I can't remember anyone talking about it after the mid-90s to be honest.
He was looking for something that made him seem old skool.
I remember stories during the Twitter takeover about him bragging constantly about writing C back in the day. Like, cool? I’ll bet tons of tech CTOs did, they still know to listen to their people on modern arch.
There are specific language extensions that Borland added to Turbo Pascal, so it's *kind of* its own language. But the extended language is more properly called "Borland Pascal", which later became Delphi.
With the language extensions Borland added to Turbo Pascal and later further advanced in Delphi, it is still true to its roots and is considered a dialect.
Modern Object Pascal is what is being driven forward today, both by Embarcadero and community developed compilers.
As a Turbo Pascal programmer for many years, it was indeed a complete language and quite a breakthrough in design. But that’s like saying your favourite car is the Model-T. Sure it was ahead of its time… but come on.
Well if you want to talk history :) Turbo Pascal was created by Anders Hejsberg, a brilliant designer whose made C# and Typescript, and libraries and enhancements (like OOP) made it a powerful language. But the single pass compiler built into the IDE really changed software development.
Turbo Pascal was indeed pretty fun, in a pre-Python world. I have fond memories of goofy stuff I made while learning to code during middle/high school.
If you want to get technical, Turbo Pascal isn't even a language. It's the name of the tool you use to code in the language. The language is just Pascal. It's like saying your favorite language is Visual Studio.
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He was maybe 10 or 11. Had a great time with it...
I'll bet the same $40 that if I ask him about it, he'll have the same fondness he has for Christopher Lampton's 1986 book, "How to Create Adventure Games," which was probably his first extensive look under the digital hood...
I learned assembly using punch cards on an NCR mainframe. (My first language!)
🤣
He probs tries to sell an 'old-skool' engineer image
Only reason it was preferred as a learning language was because it forces declaring your variables, haven't encountered it much out in the wild beyond that
Usually with some assembler thrown in for low-level stuff that needs to be speedy
I can see someone having fond memories of TP. I can also see Musk overhearing his betters talk about it and thinking "I want to be cool too :("
He was looking for something that made him seem old skool.
I remember stories during the Twitter takeover about him bragging constantly about writing C back in the day. Like, cool? I’ll bet tons of tech CTOs did, they still know to listen to their people on modern arch.
"What's your favorite game?"
"XBox"
Musk: Path of Exile 2.
Interviewer: That you actually play, not pay someone to play for you.
Musk: Err....
Modern Object Pascal is what is being driven forward today, both by Embarcadero and community developed compilers.
Language standardization was quite poor in the '80s anyways so it's customary to name the vendor-specfic variant. ANSI C didn't even exist till 1989.
The textbook, such as it was, was an obvious hack job of hastily translated code. There were even a few := here and there that got missed.