As I am slowly getting into programming again, after a lull of about a year, I
wonder why the language in which I do that, namely Pascal, has gotten so very
unpopular over the years? If you look at internet rankings of favorite program-
ming languages, then Pascal (or Delphi / Lazarus) is always very much down in
the lists. I sincerely do not understand that. When you use Lazarus (my weapon
of choice) you can develop nicely working programs in a very short time as a
result of the rapid development paradigma that it follows. It also compiles for
multiple platforms (Win, Linux, Mac) without too much hassle. Further, the
strongly typed and very readable language makes sure you can only do sane things
and not, say, cast a string to an integer (Which makes no sense, but can be done
in other languages, with unwanted results).
Is it too old-fashioned? Does it not have enough tools for working with data-
sets? I have no idea. The only thing I do know, is that it is easy to write,
easy to debug and saving you from a lot of GUI item wrestling. Or am I getting
old and have I totally missed the point of Python (whitespace as an important
item? Why?), Rust and others.
Well, I will just stick to my guns. I have always lived by the rule of "if it
ain't broken don't fix it", and I am not going to change that now.
