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kreelmanHNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

I learnt Pascal in my first year of University

… I learnt Pascal in my first year of University. After a brief stint of BASIC, I fixed up a failing project using Delphi. This was the start of a long (long..) stint of Delphi programming. I've now opted for a lower paying role to learn new skills. I'm loving it. I should have done this a long time ago, but life is what happens while you make plans. I think one of the biggest problem older Delphi apps have is that they lock themselves in to working well in a Windows GUI environment. Early Delphi based project successes, because of quick initial deliveries (due to RAD/ROI), of mostly working applications mask the problem of a lack of architectural forethought. I suspect a very difficult problem for most Delphi apps these days is disentangling working, legacy business logic from many sometimes very old forms and code into a more web consumable format. I've thought of starting a business to do this very thing, but others are doing this quite well I think. The well thought out apps, that did have some reasonable architectural forethought, have probably been ported to C# by now. …

Original discussionAsk HN: Are people still using Pascal in 2023?251 source comments · at import
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P5
p5vHN

Pascal, and later on Delphi, was what introduced me to programming 20-something years ago. As with most folks in our generation, I quickly discovered other options, more suitable for that relatively fresh thing called the Web. So, i generally considered Pascal a dead language. I was surprised to find out the other day that Delphi is not only alive, but thriving in its own way. Its community is as strong and as fervent about using it as it was back then. Even on the open-source front, there is an alternative IDE called Lazarus that offers a similar developer experience at no cost. This got me curious. Who is still using Pascal/Delphi in 2023 and what for? Has it matured beyond the desktop app? Has it transitioned into the cloud-native era?

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braabeHN

I have a similar story to this: Learnt Delphi (Lazarus) in school, got put on a Delphi project on my first job because I was the only one to "know" the language. The application only had maybe 100k lines of code, but had been started around 1984 (in Pascal, I imagine) and had expanded ever since. I only took over because the previous (only) developer had just retired. I got hired for my second job, because of my previous experience with Delphi. It was a cool job with amazing colleagues, but I have opted to go for a degree in Computer science and I am not going back to Delphi. There were many small frustrations with the language. I have recently worked a lot with GoLang and Python and have come to appreciate the extensive (standard)libraries these language provide. I know how to manage memory or reverse/traverse some iterable by hand - but do I have to? I feel like my time is spent much b…

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GoblinSlayerHN

Architecture is needed for relatively big software, but not all specialized software is this big. I once made an application that got away with being just an html document, no angular I swear, its function was to fill a medical form and print it with IE's builtin printing function.

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