“I find it hilarious when people think of Pascal as some old, slow, useless language that would be a terrible choice for anything, yet still think of C as a realistic language to choose for development today.”

“ We want so badly to believe that the language/OS situation today is based to a large degree on some contest of technical merit, but from my experience, it’s mostly an accident of social dynamics.”

https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1393#comment-18610 (hat tip + references at https://twitter.com/wallingf/status/911962530918084608)

@22 The comment "We want so badly to believe" is a strange one to me. I thought most people would consider technical merit to be only a small factor. Programming language communities are after al intensely tribal.

But the point about Pascal is often made about Fortran too, usually by people who don't know the language at all.

I find it also interesting that so many people claim to love C and hate C++.

@wim_v12e “I thought most people would consider technical merit to be only a small factor”—wow, you’re very reflective! I agree but most people correlate a thing’s success with its quality (cue Duncan Watts’ MusicLab).

About Pascal/Fortran—I took the original comment to be more about the agedness of C for writing “modern apps”. I am a little familiar with eking out Fortran-grade performance out of C (restricted pointers…), but haven’t really looked a Fortran—keep hoping for something newer.

@wim_v12e I’m familiar with the “C rules, C++ sucks” people also. I explain that to myself as, well, you can teach someone (or learn) to write C with a pretty skinny K&R book, but StackOverflow has a legitimate book list, containing multiple door-stoppers, for C++ (https://stackoverflow.com/q/388242/500207). It’s harder to dismiss C with a semi-serious Pascal (or Fortran) argument since they’ve been adding to it. But by gosh, it’s so… terrible.