For me, I started with BASIC on various machines, then moved to CP/M, then MS-DOS. I learned Turbo Pascal to be able to maintain a program that talked to a GTEK EPROM burner, and fell in love with the language after a few months.
I stuck with it through the various iterations, right up to the point where Borland's management went insane, and they lost their chief architect to Microsoft. I tried C++ after that, but the amount of boilerplate and cruft compared to Delphi was just unbearable.
Things I personally hate about C include
* Case Sensitivity
* NULL terminated strings
* Macros (there are usually many skunks worth of code smells compressed into C macros)
* Pointer syntax that is way to easy to confuse with line noise.
* Slow, oh so slow compiler/linker cycles
* Usual association with make
Pascal is faster in compile and runtime. It's smaller, and has almost magical string these days.
I really appreciate you sharing that journey — it reads like a personal history of programming.
I’ve heard others mention the elegance of Turbo Pascal and Delphi, especially the string handling.
And yes — C macros and pointer syntax can absolutely feel like arcane incantations sometimes.
I guess in the end, we all gravitate toward the languages that feel like home.
Comments
For me, I started with BASIC on various machines, then moved to CP/M, then MS-DOS. I learned Turbo Pascal to be able to maintain a program that talked to a GTEK EPROM burner, and fell in love with the language after a few months.
I stuck with it through the various iterations, right up to the point where Borland's management went insane, and they lost their chief architect to Microsoft. I tried C++ after that, but the amount of boilerplate and cruft compared to Delphi was just unbearable.
Things I personally hate about C include
Pascal is faster in compile and runtime. It's smaller, and has almost magical string these days.I really appreciate you sharing that journey — it reads like a personal history of programming. I’ve heard others mention the elegance of Turbo Pascal and Delphi, especially the string handling. And yes — C macros and pointer syntax can absolutely feel like arcane incantations sometimes.
I guess in the end, we all gravitate toward the languages that feel like home.