Ask Slashdot: Is Pascal Underrated?

Posted by timothy on Sunday January 25, 2015 @06:59AM from the let's-make-a-wager dept.

An anonymous reader writes In the recent Slashdot discussion on the D programming language, I was surprised to see criticisms of Pascal that were based on old information and outdated implementations. While I'm sure that, for example, Brian Kernighan's criticisms of Pascal were valid in 1981, things have moved on since then. Current Object Pascal largely addresses Kernighan's critique and also includes language features such as anonymous methods, reflection and attributes, class helpers, generics and more (see also Marco Cantu's recent Object Pascal presentation). Cross-platform development is fairly straightforward with Pascal. Delphi targets Windows, OS X, iOS and Android. Free Pascal targets many operating systems and architectures and Lazarus provides a Delphi-like IDE for Free Pascal. So what do you think? Is Pascal underrated?

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Re:Modula-3 FTW! by gnupun · 2015-01-25 08:29 · Score: 0, Troll

begin
Pascal should die!
end
Yes, because only ugly, unreadable languages like C/C++, PHP and Perl are favorned because they make programmers look cleverer and provide job security through obscurity (of code). Clean languages like Pascal, Python or Java are derided as ivory tower and unpractical although they are readable, encourage good design and help finding/preventing more bugs in the development phase.