[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

However, Pascal WAS a great deal better than Basic, at least the Borland version. It was available for different platforms, and it had the BGI, or Borland Graphics Interface, which made graphics essentially cross-platform. It also had a framework called Turbo Vision, which is basically the MS-DOS-predecessor of the Visual Component Library (VCL) from Delphi. The designer of Turbo Vision and later the VCL tried to get the VCL included in Windows for years, but Microsoft wouldn't hear of it.

Oh, agreed. But some degree of standardization crept in, because it was Pascal intended to run on an Intel x86 architecture under a Microsoft OS.

You could write in Pascal on DEC systems using DEC's version of Pascal, but have fun trying to get your Borland code to build and run on VAX...

(DEC had VAX BASIC, too, but the same comments about getting PC code to run under it apply even more strongly.)

Then C# came out, and when I first used it in 2006, my reaction was:

"Man... this is like Delphi/VCL, but with C syntax!"

Sure enough, both the VCL and .NET were designed by the same man: Anders Hejlsberg. The VCL used either C++ (Borland C++ Builder) or Object Pascal (Delphi), and they later got combined within the same IDE.

Therefore...

(Delphi/C++ on top of VCL) == (VB/C#/etc on top of .NET)

And back when we had Kylix, which was Object Pascal on Linux. That failed because developers on Linux wouldn't pay for it. With C/C++ the preferred languages and GCC available free, why buy Kylix? Too few did, and Embarcadero dropped it.

I know, and if you need pure speed, C and C++ (which, on compiling, strips ALL of the syntactic sugar such as objects en such) are still unmatched. C and C++ compilers are so good nowadays that it's virtually impossible to write more efficient assembler code by hand.

Yep. Optimization is something the compiler does for you. It can simply do it better than you can. People trying to hand-craft their own Assembler for speed-critical stuff are usually crafting faster ways to shoot themselves in the foot.

(The bigger and far worse sin is premature optimization, but that's another topic entirely.)

A lot of the problems I've seen reported might not have occurred, however, if developers had thought of C++ as a new language instead of as a superset of C.

To some extent, steps like these are still common in (for example) the GNU toolchain: compiling from one language to an intermediary, to object code, with assembler compiled by a different program, and then they're all linked together.

Yes. And going back a bit, DEC had their Common Object File Format, intended to let you write modules in whichever language - BASIC, C, Pascal, Assembler - they offered, depending on what that module was best written in, and then link them together to form an executable without worrying about what languages the parts were written in.

Agreed. If there's one thing I don't miss from C and C++, it's memory management... but I DO miss strong typing when working in something like Javascript of PHP.

If you are used to it, of course you will. I don't expect PHP to get strong typing any time soon, however.

Strong typing, and enforcing variable declarations should be _mandatory_ in any language, because now, the biggest causes of bugs have moved from mishandling memory management, to typo's in variable and function names.

And it would require $DEITY to pass a miracle to order for that to happen.

edit:
Anders Hejlsberg

Aaaaaaand.... there you have it, why TypeScript (the 'strongly typed Javascript') uses Pascal-style type syntax: this guy is the lead designer of that language. It seems that, apart from C/C++ (Ritchie, Kernighan, Thompson/Stroustrup), everything I've ever used with regard to programming was either designed, or heavily influenced by Hejlsberg.

I think he needs to be in the same hall of fame as Ritchie, Kernighan, Thompson and Stroustrup. They defined much of the computing environments and languages in the 1960's, 1970's and early 1980's, while Anders Hejlsberg defined most of the stuff from 1985 onwards. First it was Turbo Pascal which made a cheap and powerful compiler and IDE available to everyone (with the Borland Pascal version yet more powerful for professionals), and then Delphi was HUGE from 1995 up to 2004-5, with Delphi 7 and C++ Builder being the best IDE's ever created... IMHO. After 2004-5, .NET basically took over, but it was designed by the same man.

If you are going to add Hejlberg to that pantheon, also add Dave Cutler. Dave is Chief Architect of Windows NT, and before he came to Microsoft he was Chief Architect of DEC's VMS OS on VAX systems. He was adamant that NT be portable, as he understood that NT might not only need to run on Intel x86 architecture. Windows RT never really got anywhere because the rest of the pieces of that puzzle weren't in place, But Win10S on ARM has promise.

And now that development is moving towards more and more Javascript, taking it out of the browser with NodeJS and it not being fit for purpose anymore (apps are getting too large for a dynamic, untyped language), he is _again_ the lead designer of the next big thing.

JavaScript is an embed-able script language. It began on browsers, but no surprise it had turned up elsewhere. And things like Typescript are syntactic sugar intended to provide strong typing to JavaScript. Hardly the first time something like that has occurred. Remember that C++ which added objects originally compiled to standard C.
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Dennis