Yet another Hacker News

They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pascal 7

84 points andsoitis 1 hour ago 51 comments

szundi 1 hour ago | parent

I have learned PC programming on the DOS version.

phoronixrly 1 hour ago | parent

No, now you are running an IDE that is badly pretending not to be a browser, while an entire second application has to work in the background eating even more RAM to provide you with access to documentation for each function at the cursor...

pixl97 56 minutes ago | parent

I mean, you could go write up an IDE that acts like that old one in a few weeks now. Could use a ton less RAM. You'll be the only person using it while everyone else uses the browser for convenience.

Grombobulous 48 minutes ago | parent

You don’t even need to do that, there are plenty of IDEs that are lightweight and not web-based.

There’s just no reason to be mad that something is popular. Sure, VSCode is the most popular, if that person doesn’t like it they should just use something else.

phoronixrly 19 minutes ago | parent

I'm not mad that VScode is popular. I am mad at people that are not appalled by the resource use of vscode and clones, by the sluggish UI, by the abysmal security (with the latest example being the multi-billion bitcoin theft), by the walled garden that allowed a backdoored extension despite its very stated purpose... You know, all factors that a competent programmer would find important when making a choice of tools...

egorfine 59 minutes ago | parent

> Windows 3.1 [] not that there were many alternatives at that time

OS/2 was more popular than Windows 3.1.

Update: or maybe it wasn't. Seems like different bubbles had different mainstream OS.

linuxhiker 57 minutes ago | parent

Oh man, the good old days. Running Windows apps in OS/2 and having OS/2 run them faster because it was true 32bit.

AnimalMuppet 55 minutes ago | parent

Source? That's sure not the way I remember it. I don't think I ever saw OS/2 outside of in computer stores. I don't think I ever saw a single customer actually using it, either professionally or on a home computer.

Sure, that's anecdote. Do you have data?

egorfine 47 minutes ago | parent

Nah, no data. Too lazy to dig around. I vividly remember that in my bubble OS/2 was running everywhere. Literally everybody used it, me included. We considered Windows a joke. Some networking software that we used (Fidonet) was literally OS/2 only.

But then I remember how OS/2 was dying a slow death while Windows 95 rose.

So yes, an anecdote it is.

AnimalMuppet 29 minutes ago | parent

Well, I asked, because I'm also too lazy to dig around for data. So, it's hard for me to complain...

[Edit: All right, I did a very superficial digging, and didn't get an apples-to-apples comparison. But it said that OS/2 sold 2.5 million desktop and 340,000 server versions in 1996. Windows 3.1 sold over 3 million copies within the first three months of its release in 1992. So by 1996, OS/2 may have been more popular than Windows 3.1, because the Windows world had moved on to Win95.]

SoftTalker 45 minutes ago | parent

OS/2 was somewhat popular in corporate settings that were already "IBM shops." And I saw a bit of it in academia/scientific workplaces.

Never knew anyone who ran it at home.

svennek 38 minutes ago | parent

I ran it at home as a teenager, as I got a free Warp cd at a store (when they cancelled the product). Ran it for a few days, then went back to windows (95 likely) and later linux....

wolfi1 36 minutes ago | parent

OS/2 more popular, not in my part of Europe, although it had its fan base. there were even OS/2 (Warp) freebie cd-roms at the time. I was quite fond of it, but Win 95 killed it

pjmlp 26 minutes ago | parent

It certainly wasn't in Europe, plus it required more expensive hardware.

Back in 1992, it would had cost me about an extra 500 euros on today's money.

armcat 58 minutes ago | parent

My first real programming project was creating a pong clone on DOS using Turbo Pascal, as a 12 year old, in the mid 90s. Many years later, when I was in the penultimate year of uni, I worked as a freelance Delphi programmer. I had no idea Pascal would help me buy my first car many years later.

msdz 57 minutes ago | parent

As someone born after the release of TP 7, this was a fascinating read!

I wouldn’t necessarily have expected for Microsoft to make development (at least the “intended” way) for early not-just-DOS Windows this unergonomic, but now in hindsight, it’s also not that surprising, really.

mapontosevenths 56 minutes ago | parent

> "That almost nobody has the skills these days to implement something like TP is something we could eventually come to regret – or, rather, our grandchildren could. Software development is becoming a semi-skilled industry, and I doubt that the rise of AI will entirely compensate for this."

I agree, but AI also there is hope!

For many years I've worried about the ever-growing depth of abstraction in computing. There are few alive now who actually understand all of the layers on abstraction involved in modern computing, and who can debug the truly strange edge case bugs and vulnerabilities introduced by the interoperation of these many complex layers.

For a time I imagined it to be an unsolvable problem, and that there would always be only a special class of neurodivergent hyper-specialists who still mostly had to work in large teams to even come close to understanding a stack in full. We're reaching the point where a single human lifespan just isn't enough to learn it all, even for those of us with what Dilbert called "The Knack". By the time you're proficient in all of it - you're dead.

Now there is a new kind of intelligence. One that CAN fit it all in a single mind, and one that will outlive us all and continue to learn long after our meat has gone bad.

As long as the AI's stay aligned, and we find ways to build them more efficiently there's a non-zero chance that they actually make it all better instead of worse. Genuinely long-term planning and the ability to TRULY grasp the full stack COULD actually happen. At least if we use these new systems in service of the greater good, and not just to play silly games on the stock market.

hnlmorg 42 minutes ago | parent

There’s no substitute for human knowledge. What if the climate crisis gets to the point where we cannot justify boiling the ocean to perform tasks we’ve come to depend on?

What’s our disaster recovery strategy in the event of war and loss of internet?

Or worse yet, a near extinction event and we are forced to rebuild civilisation from memory?

Some of these might seem like extreme edge case scenarios but then history is full of disasters that people didn’t prepare for because they assumed they were too big to fail.

andsoitis 38 minutes ago | parent

> There’s no substitute for human knowledge.

Would you not say that AI is an expression of the sum of all human knowledge? And as humans continue to generate more knowledge, it too, will be added to the AI's representation of it all?

hnlmorg 37 minutes ago | parent

I would say your reply feels like you didn’t read beyond the first sentence of my comment.

If you did, then I apologise. But my point is about accessing that knowledge when AI isn’t available. Not about how AI discovered its corpus to begin with.

andsoitis 31 minutes ago | parent

I re-read it. I think your thesis is that we ought not to depend on technology in case the infra to support it goes away. Does that capture it?

hnlmorg 24 minutes ago | parent

No. It’s that we shouldn’t depend on AI always being available.

Absolutely we should use all the tools at our disposal which enhances productivity. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also learn how’re to do things for ourselves too.

To use a contrived example, there’s no shame in using a dishwasher. But if you cannot wash dishes by hand when the dishwasher breaks down, then you know you have problems.

andsoitis 18 minutes ago | parent

> It’s that we shouldn’t depend on AI always being available.

I made the general tech-dependence statement, but it sounds like you think it is only AI tech that shouldnt' depend on. I wouldn't worry about it; humanity has proven itself to be INCREDIBLY resilient and adaptable when the things we've come to depend on go away or change materially.

hnlmorg 5 minutes ago | parent

We aren’t just talking about technology, we are talking about knowledge.

Like I said, I have zero issue being “AI first”. 90% of my day-to-day is using AI. But the part I objected to in the OP was “we don’t need to know things because we have AI” (to paraphrase. So I was asking the question: what if AI goes away?

I agree humans are resilient. But that’a not a good excuse for complacency.

elisbce 32 minutes ago | parent

That already happened many times in history to many civilizations. Knowledge was discovered and lost, and rediscovered years later or never.

hnlmorg 29 minutes ago | parent

Yes, I hinted at that. And each time that civilisation fell. With the next occupiers of the land left to find it.

Do we really want to put ourselves in the same situation?

krapp 19 minutes ago | parent

We are already in that situation and it's far too late to prepare for countermeasures. The only culture we're leaving behind is our garbage.

hnlmorg 4 minutes ago | parent

I disagree. However even if that were true, that’s more of a reason to learn more instead of less.

andai 37 minutes ago | parent

Or we could just ask them to build something less embarrassing?

elisbce 36 minutes ago | parent

I’m not sure where he got that idea. All I could learn about TP was like one book sold in one bookstore in my entire city. The barriers to entry back then were astronomically higher than they are today, especially given how AI has democratized access to information, knowledge, and expertise.

herf 35 minutes ago | parent

AI is not trending towards small, minimal code with nice abstractions. It is faster at replicating "big team" code, but the code from a small team or a few authors still wins for elegance and simplicity.

iugtmkbdfil834 32 minutes ago | parent

I suppose it depends on what you mean by trending. Some of the recent rewrite news[1] for example suggest that, at minimum, it is the macro demand that is driving the software trends. In this case, issues with memory supply drive attempts at more sensible memory utilization.

[1]https://tech-insider.org/discord-electron-rust-gpui-rebuild-...

markus_zhang 29 minutes ago | parent

We do have free pascal and it looks pretty good I think.

tonyedgecombe 18 minutes ago | parent

>I agree, but AI also there is hope!

It's like a religion isn't it.

orthogonal_cube 53 minutes ago | parent

Man, I haven’t seen Turbo Pascal since high school. We were lucky enough to have a CompSci class taught by our Stats teacher.

He offered three courses. CompSci 1 used Turbo Pascal and Delphi. CompSci 2 used C++ and Java. CompSci 3 used Microsoft Turbo Assembly and a language of the student’s choice.

We had to write our code and save them to floppy discs for submission since the lab systems had DeepFreeze installed on Win95, so any local storage wouldn’t persist.

ivanmontillam 36 minutes ago | parent

> We had to write our code and save them to floppy discs for submission since the lab systems had DeepFreeze installed on Win95

Didn't realize DeepFreeze is that old. My lab used Angel Custodius[0], which was a hardware-based solution. It used a PCI-slot and the buffer was an IC on the PCI board.

It worked the same, rebooting the computer would restore the frozen state, because changes were never committed to disk.

It also was OS-agnostic, because it ran before booting anything. If you had a Linux server and got hacked, you just restarted it, though it remained vulnerable until you disabled the protection and actually patched it.

If you wanted to introduce changes you had to press a combination of keys to bypass it, by introducing the password. Mainly to apply pending Windows Updates.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20040210055959/http://www.custod...

grep_it 16 minutes ago | parent

Similar experience here, except it was Qbasic followed by Delphi. Good memories of passing our dumb little games around the compute lab. It wasn't till later in life that I connected Pascal to Wirth when reading Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs (I still think the last chapter on compilers holds amazing as an introduction to the subject).

BorisMelnik 49 minutes ago | parent

great writeup, fun reminder windows 3.1 sat on top of dos

egorfine 46 minutes ago | parent

TPC.EXE /C

never forget

ulfw 41 minutes ago | parent

Never been a big Pascal fan (though learned and used it back in the day) but i learned C and built my first Win16 and Win32 Apps for Windows 3.x and Windows 95 in Borland Turbo C(++). That was truly magical a time!

The printed documentation alone was half a meter long.

throwaway81523 38 minutes ago | parent

Required reading, "Things Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than", https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html

And: "A Personal History of Compilation Speed, Part 2" https://prog21.dadgum.com/47.html

SoftTalker 37 minutes ago | parent

> The name ‘Turbo’ was associated with what were regarded as hobbyist products

"Turbo" was also a short-lived pop-slang term roughly meaning "cool" or "awesome." I never heard it used much but a lot of products in that era had "turbo" in the name.

Sharlin 10 minutes ago | parent

The intensifier meaning of "turbo", connoting something powerful and fast, is also interesting. Its original uses are in engineering, simply denoting something that has a turbine in it. Thus turbopump, turbojet, and turbocharger, the last of which probably being the primary driver of the semantic shift.

The Latin root of "turbo" and "turbine" is turbo, meaning a whirlwind, a spinning top, or more generally any spinning motion as a noun, and "agitate, disturb" as a verb. The latter word is, of course, derived from turbo as well, as are "perturb", "turbulence", "turbid", and even "trouble"!

ivolimmen 32 minutes ago | parent

I used Borland OWL under Windows at school. I moved to Java later on and felt the sting on the last line...

prmph 30 minutes ago | parent

Oh those were the days, I remember developing my first non-trivial piece of software (an international checkers game), while still a student, with Turbo Pascal. It run to more than a thousand lines of basically the Minimax algorithm plus various optimizations (alpha beta pruning, quiescent extensions, etc)

I have fond memories of the language, the IDE, libs like TurboVision, ObjectWindows, etc... And fun times with the demos TVChess and OwlChess, which gave me inspiration.

pjmlp 28 minutes ago | parent

I can definitely vouch for Turbo Pascal, having learnt it before C was definitely a good school that strongly typed languages doesn't hinder systems programming, nor higher level ergonomics.

barelysapient 24 minutes ago | parent

Man, I have so many good memories as 9 or 10 year old kid writing Turbo Pascal 7.

The terminal IDE that it came with, if you can call it that, was ahead of its time.

hasley 23 minutes ago | parent

Is Turbo Pascal 7 really the same as Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5?

I think I used TP 7 and it was the usual blue IDE for DOS.

monster_truck 22 minutes ago | parent

The only real association I have with "Borland" is that I needed their $199 compiler to share my LibertyBasic programs with friends as .exe's when I was in middle school. That was a ton of money in the late 90's. It was singlehandedly the catalyst to me realizing I could pirate more than game roms on IRC.

_russross 12 minutes ago | parent

tcc/tinycc doesn't have the IDE but is the same compiler approach applied to modern(ish) C. Tiny, fast, and fun to use.

If you ever feel like you need a palate cleanser after reading AI code, go dig into any Fabrice Bellard project.

lgl 11 minutes ago | parent

This hits home. Turbo Pascal was the thing (although I've barely noticed at the time) where I learned actual programming, as we know now.

I had played a lot with the Spectrum (a Sinclair zx spectrum 128k) and its BASIC interpreter but that was mostly copying from magazines and changing some parameters. And BASIC is weird :)

A few years later in school in the 90s, Pascal was "the" language that most people learned the basics in, at least in my country.

Unknowingly I sort of absorbed all that and it only started making sense when a few years later I decided to get into actual programming with perl and eggdrop bots and plugins or whatever they were called.

Damn, the 90s, IRC and Quake were awesome!