On 10/01/17 19:30, Alan Corey wrote:
In Wirth's history it was Pascal, Modula, Oberon I think. I learned Pascal on a VAX and an Apple 2 at the same time for an Apple 2 project, skipped Modula (and Ada), played with Oberon some. Borland's Turbo Pascal screamed, I wrote a lot of Delphi too. Lazarus suffers from having too many authors, it's too disorganized. Borland undercut everybody on price I think, Turbo Pascal started at something like $30 when everybody else was charging $200+? I remember seeing some APL but FORTRAN seemed more useful. I think I only knew 1 person who used APL.
APL does have a certain geek appeal, but the weirdness of its right-to-left evaluation order makes the character set issues look trivial.
FWIW I've never owned a Microsoft mouse, always Logitech. Never paid money for a Microsoft product period.
We had to buy a lot of MS and IBM stuff when we bought the rights (i.e. source etc.) of what would today be called a SCADA package. I ended up rewriting from scratch in Delphi, while I do quite a lot using FPC+Lazarus I've never ported that stuff.
Desperately trying to keep somewhat on-topic: Lazarus does a pretty good job of being what 30 years ago we'd have called a 4GL, with a drag-and-drop form builder, database access and the rest. However I'd like to salute one specific MS product: Visual Basic for DOS. If there had been anything comparable to that (or to one of the 4GLs such as dbXL or whatever) using Curses on Linux it might really have made a difference to the extent to which it was adopted.
-- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]