I was a sysadmin, mobile dev. expert, Nintendo DS game programmer, Pascal compiler dev., Java consultant, assembler guru, automated QA engineer, embedded C/C++ maintainer. Some say I'm a hacker.
By the looks of it, half of these are really immature, esoteric and small languages (Roughly Go and Rust are the only exceptions). While I adore these, and love diversity, I'd never use one of these in production. Tried a few years back with some others and it didn't work out brilliantly... Long story.
But, I'm unsure why people don't consider Pascal any more as a viable alternative for product development.
It has 50 years of proven history (longer than C itself, actually), current variants have modern features (clearly, most of what sane people use from C++ for sure, and more), it's strongly typed, it's usually considered very readable and beginner friendly - as it was originally designed as a teaching language, and it has an extremely mature (20+ years old), but continuously maintained self hosted free and open source (GPL) implementation, supporting dozens of platforms and most major and important CPU architectures (Free Pascal). It can also do and support embedded directly. And it compiles to 100% native code. Or it can also target a JVM if you want to port the same code over to Android for example. It doesn't sport a garbage collector out of the box, but it has some reference counted container types, and it has a plugable memory management system, with 3rd party garbage collectors, if one insists on having that.
It also guarantees your code investment. I've seen someone compiling some scientific Pascal code from the '70s with FPC to a native 64bit Linux binary, and hooking it into a Travis CI setup. It's not going to break its syntax with the next major version for sure.
Although admitted, Pascal is not trendy and not considered cool for sure in many circles. Depends on what one's priorities are. ;)
By the looks of it, half of these are really immature, esoteric and small languages (Roughly Go and Rust are the only exceptions). While I adore these, and love diversity, I'd never use one of these in production. Tried a few years back with some others and it didn't work out brilliantly... Long story.
But, I'm unsure why people don't consider Pascal any more as a viable alternative for product development.
It has 50 years of proven history (longer than C itself, actually), current variants have modern features (clearly, most of what sane people use from C++ for sure, and more), it's strongly typed, it's usually considered very readable and beginner friendly - as it was originally designed as a teaching language, and it has an extremely mature (20+ years old), but continuously maintained self hosted free and open source (GPL) implementation, supporting dozens of platforms and most major and important CPU architectures (Free Pascal). It can also do and support embedded directly. And it compiles to 100% native code. Or it can also target a JVM if you want to port the same code over to Android for example. It doesn't sport a garbage collector out of the box, but it has some reference counted container types, and it has a plugable memory management system, with 3rd party garbage collectors, if one insists on having that.
It also guarantees your code investment. I've seen someone compiling some scientific Pascal code from the '70s with FPC to a native 64bit Linux binary, and hooking it into a Travis CI setup. It's not going to break its syntax with the next major version for sure.
Although admitted, Pascal is not trendy and not considered cool for sure in many circles. Depends on what one's priorities are. ;)
Good point on Pascal!
Pascal is still alive and well, and still under active development and support.
Plus the extended version from back in the 1980s, by Niklaus Wirth and Apple. Called Object Pascal.
Although these days Pascal is around under branding names:
There are probably others, those are the one's I've used.