Trendsport Pascal-Bashing

Written by T$

In the last two years a certain attitude has found its way into the brains of many people. Due to the fact that most of these people are called "coders", I'll describe it in a more understandable way:

if(ProgrammingLanguage==Pascal) {ProgrammerSucks=True;}

We can make it look better:

cmp ProgrammingLanguage , Pascal
sete ProgrammerSucks

Got the idea? Why are Pascal coders no longer regarded as serious ones? Maybe because it is a language often used by beginners, and usually beginners stuff is naturally not that impressive. And if someone has advanced to another language he can do more than the Pascal writers, something which can make him say "me God, you Smurf", causing him to feel elevated.

Maybe the problem has a deeper, more pschologic dimension. Where do a lot of people get into contact with Pascal? It is called "school", more exactly a subject called "informatics". Because attending it is voluntary, the pupils in it did not know what it is like or they were masochists.

I didn't attend this class, I was not interested in seeing that your marks are good if you have drawn your structogram (a flow diagram looking like modern art) well while using coding tricks makes the teacher say you should learn instead of doing nonsense. The only computer-related lessons I had to attend were called ITG (information technical basic knowledge) in class 8. All pupils had to go there for obtaining the HOW-TO in using DOS, MS-Works or even BASIC. Well, we had fun pressing the teacher's PC's reset button, causing him to believe the PC had crashed or even thinking of a virus. I used to play Nibbles until they installed mirrors in the back in order to see "hackers" who installed number-eating worms on their PCs.

That was enough for me, I expected informatics in class 12/13 to be the same... it was true. Only one of the people going there has ever written a real program. The other two in my class who could program did not go there, including me. Everything I heard about these lessons confirmed my opinion that "informatics" at school has in most cases nothing to do with computer science or programming. It deals with ancient ways of teaching, nothing more.

But why should coders suffer just because their programming language is used at school? Is Triton's "Crystal Dreams" bullshit just because it was partly written in Pascal? The most important program we use contain Pascal: It is called "FastTracker II". What would we be nowadays without it? It has served us more than many c00l Pascal-free releases, and is still doing so.

Think. It is the code that counts, not the language it is written in. One may say that TP is restricted to 16 Bit. Wrong, using some Asm one can do more (OK, some are swimming from Dover to Calais instead of using the tunnel). And TP is not the last Pascal version...

Epilogue

Some may think: "Oh no, another boring Pascal sucker, please leave us with your BGI trash." You're wrong. On my HD, 90% of the sources have endings like .asm, .inc, etc. About 10% have endings like .c or .js. Nevertheless I have TP, too ... copied runable onto a CDR just for the case others bring .pas-files to me for whatever reason. It has never been on my HD for a long time.