On Thu, 2 Jan 2003, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> I remember very clearly a discussion I had with a friend 11 years ago
> when I was in the 11th grade. We were studying then Turbo Pascal on DOS and
> also using Windows (3.1) at school, and I told him about C and Unix, which
> were virtually unknown (especially in Israel) at the time. He said that
> Turbo Pascal was the wave of the future, and C was a relic of the past (I
> admitted to him that C had been invented 15 years earlier). I claimed this
> was wrong, that C and Unix were technically superior and they shall inherit
> the earth :)
> I think the more years that have passed, the closer my claim gets to reality.
> Unix (in the form of Linux) is getting more and more common, and C (and C++)
> have become the lingua franca of the entire industry, and Turbo Pascal is
> barely remembered (in the form of Delphi).
> This friend of mine, on the other hand, can now do absolutely nothing with
> his knowledge of Turbo Pascal and DOS, and yelling "But these were the most
> common software when I studied!" will not help him one iota.
>
I think UNIX was still commonly used at this point. My father keeps
telling me of how how he his company installed a BSD server which had
several text terminals. It was some kind of Motorola chip-based
mini-computer. People used such things as heavyweight servers, but few
people used them at home.
Now, of course as personal machines became 32-bit and much more powerful
than they (or those mini-computers) were at that point, UNIX on a PC is
reality. I also think C was commonly used as a language to program DOS
programs. There were Turbo C and Microsoft C, as long as there were Turbo
Pascal and MS Pascal.
I don't know what percentage of DOS programmers used Pascal and what
percentage used C. But I think Pascal was especially strong in education
because it is an easier language to teach to beginners. I should note that
the C used for DOS (which I tempered with using Turbo C++ 3.0) was
quite incompatible with that of UNIXes. There were many Borland-specific
extensions and the code was 16-bit (16-bit ints and near and far pointes)
where the UNIX code was 32-bit and POSIXial.
As servers, UNIX have become more popular nowadays due to the fact that
the computers that are powerful enough to serve as UNIX servers have
become much cheaper, and Internet and other TCP/IP networks give way to
UNIX very easily. A common UNIX server deploys programs in several
languages: C, shell, Perl, Python, Tcl, Awk, sed, make, Java, etc. What
unites most of these language is that they are written in C directly or
indirectly. And C is the only language that is expected to bootstrap
itself.[1]
Knoweldge of Turbo Pascal is not completely useless. A Pascal programmer
who learns C will have an easier time than a complete beginner who
does. Delphi programming has so much more besides what existed in Turbo
Pascal, that will also take some time to learn (all the GUI and
abstractions they wrote) But UNIX and C knowledge is as applicable today
as it was 11 years ago, as UNIX retained backward compatiblity since then.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
[1] - There are a few exceptions. ghc is an Haskell compiler that is the
only tool capable of compiling its own Haskell code. The GNU Ada compiler
is written in Ada. There's also a Dylan compiler written in Dylan, but
luckily there's also a Dylan interpreter written in C that can compile it.
I find this kind of bootstrapping a sure way to make your tool unpopular.
As the old hackers poem says "Write in C".
>
> --
> Nadav Har'El | Thursday, Jan 2 2003, 28 Tevet 5763
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] |-----------------------------------------
> Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Cat rule #2: Bite the hand that won't
> http://nadav.harel.org.il |feed you fast enough.
>
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Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
"Wait a second - is n a natural number?"
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