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The Bottom 10 - Come on now!

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<PERSONAL RANT - Not To Be Construed To Be The Opinions of My Employer>

Ok, well according to John Dvorak I contributed to the #9 item on the "The Bottom 10 Worst Software Disasters"!

Specifically, I'm one of those guys who produced one of the "numerous iterations of cheap Pascal " - Pascal/MT+. It had many variations for the 8080/Z80, 8086 and 68K (manual in PDF format for 68K found here).

I have been writing compilers since 1970 and Pascal/MT+ was a very successful product by 1980's standards (sales > $40M!). The first version of Pascal/MT (copied in my bedroom onto 8-inch floppy diskettes) sold for $49.95 and was used by companies like IBM and GE to build embedded systems in 1980. It eventually morphed into a "large" (for the time) system that included a compiler, linker, debugger, and full-screen text editor.

Pascal/MT+ was one of the first PC-based languages to have an IDE- built-in editor, syntax checker and compiler. It ran on a 64k Z80 (note that's k not MB)!  This was in 1980!, TurboPascal, according to Borland's website, shipped November 20, 1983!

Pascal/MT+ was used to create many successful products as well as the first version of CP/M 68K (in 1982).

So while I agree that Pascal has gone out of fashion I don't think that our (the compiler writer community) collective efforts to raise the level of development abstraction (everyone who was anyone in 1979 wrote in assembly language [and argued about which set of mnemonics to use!]) deserves to be categorized in quite this fashion.

C'mon John, certainly you can find something else for that list... how about EasyWriter?

</PERSONAL RANT>

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 23, 2004
    In Czech Republic was competions in programming for school children, I was one of them in that time (around 1990), allowed languages Turbo Pascal and Borland C. Guys which programmed in Pascal was better, just because in C first you need to write is string library, so thanks for "string" ...
    BTW still developing some application in TP for DOS thats still sells, wow thats ancient :-)
    Of course now I am programming mostly in C++, but still want speed of compilation of Pascal back :-), I know C# brings it, but for time critical applications is not good enough.
  • Anonymous
    September 09, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2004
    After reading the Dvorak article (for fun?), I now remember why I despise 'The Press' and why I only read PC Mag, Computerworld, etc for the advertisements (which I guess is the only thing the publishers care about). They are just so often completely or partially wrong that one can seldom tell the truth from fiction and opinion.