Historical language survey

[Walter Bright]

Don Clugston wrote:
> Just Pascal, and I never liked it.
> <rant> It seemed to go out of its way to make pointers difficult to 
> understand. Plus, the first line of code was the "program" statement, 
> which didn't actually do anything, and the last was an almost invisible 
> fullstop. This was supposed to be a good teaching language? </rant>

I liked Pascal until I tried to write useful programs in it (this was 
with Pascal implemented according to Wirth's book). It seems I spent all 
my development time fighting the compiler. The language semantics locked 
everything up so tight there was no way to get things done.

Then I read K+R, and it was like the light coming on. The language let 
me do what I want (casting is the magic ingredient). Despite using early 
very buggy C compilers, I spent my time working on my algorithms rather 
than fighting the compiler.

Pascal vendors noticed the exodus to C, and added a whole boatload of 
C-like extensions to Pascal to make it a usable. By then, though, it was 
too late to interest me; I never looked at Pascal again. (The other 
problem with all those extensions is every vendor did them differently, 
making Pascal probably the most non-portable language in existence 
because you *had* to use the extensions.)

Pascal basically missed its market window.