"Old" programming languages

[gpatrick]

I've started reading the Object Pascal Handbook by Marco Cantu, and see it has evolved greatly since Wirth released it in 1970, and my use of it in the early 2000s. But it seems to get no love and is always regarded as an "old" language that is vastly outdated with minimal use today.

Is this just hatred? Fear? Ignorance? UNIX was released in 1971 and it is still in use today, although some may counter that Linux is the most prevalent server operating system today. Although it was released in 1991, and by technological standards, Linux is very old.

The C programming language is still widely used, although it was released in 1972. Perl was released in 1987. Ada 1980. Lisp 1958. Python 1991.

The main thing with those listed is that they have changed and added new features. Clojure (2007) is a Common Lisp (1984) and is fairly recent. Racket (1995) has evolved from Scheme (1975). C has a new standard, as does Ada. They haven't stagnated, and neither has Pascal.

But it seems too many believe if it isn't new then it is no longer useful. Which is why front-end developers need to learn something new every 30 days.

[victorvas]

I've read about Pascal being an educational programming language, and that is has no use in real world applications.

[roddierod]

At my current job, we used Delphi (Object Pascal) from 1999 to about 2007/8. I still have a number of Marco Cantu books on my shelves he was always the goto guy for us. Mac OS class library was written in Object Pascal from 1985 to 1991 (MacApp)

The main reason for the switch was political or a management decision it had nothing to do with language or it capabilities more of the perception that since "everbody" is using this or that language or more so in our case Microsoft doesn't support it we have to switch.

I had used Delphi for just about anything you can think of in a enterprise environment. Desktop GUI apps, command line file loaders, db heavy apps, MS office automation applications, even had a web application that connected to our main production db that provider real time authorizations for medical services.

I think most of the "no love" comes from ignorance and what seems to me to be the combination of marketing taking over software development, the lack of knowledge of history in the software/computer field and the belief if it not shiney and new it probably needs to be replaced. I mean you have languages putting out "new" features that are the vast majority of the time nothing but new libraries. JavaScripts a good example you have a "framework" that everyone is using and is perfectly fine but then it falls out of favor and everyone switches.

Anyway back to Pascal, there are still things Delphi did in rapid GUI development in the time I used it that I don't think MS Visual Studio has caught up with still. Granted I have kept up with Pascal/Delphi since we full switched (now mainly C# and Python) over.

Just my half dollar.