50 Years of Pascal and Delphi is In Power It’s 50 years of the Pascal language and Delphi is its heir, empowering Pascal developers in today’s complex scenarios, despite being ignored by the Pascal language inventor
Niklaus Wirth published the paper The programming language Pascal in March 1971, which means it is exactly 50 years this month since the Pascal programming language was officially launched.
The renowned computer scientists celebrated the anniversary by writing a very interesting viewpoint article for Communications of the ACM (March 2021, Vol. 64 No. 3, Pages 39-41) and titled 50 Years of Pascal.
The article is fully worth reading and I suggest you to go over it before continuing with this blog post. I ll wait here. Done? OK, good, here are my comments.
The event brings together developers who use Oberon-family systems in their practice, and interested listeners. Every year, experts representing fundamental science (high energy physics, biophysics), strategic industries (Rosatom), the industry of control systems (APCS, unmanned aerial vehicles), small innovative business (development of software systems for various purposes) make reports. Also in the center of attention are the problems of IT education, from grade 5 to specialized higher, and the key to their solution, developed by the Informatics-21 project. The mission of the seminar, besides the exchange of experience between the participants, is the broadcast of IT education in the industry and in the field of education.
1 reminded me of Oberon, a delightfully insane system I used back when I was studying computer science at ETH Zürich. The first thing you have to understand about Oberon is that it evolved entirely outside of the normal genealogy of user interfaces. Extremely simplified, the evolution of modern graphical user interfaces goes something like this:
The Lisa marked the first modern user interface with windows, icons as objects, menus and mouse input. To this day, these concepts remain essentially unchanged. A person used to Vista or Mac OS X would immediately understand how the Lisa works.
Oberon is not part of the «Lisa» line of user interfaces. The following part is based on what people at ETH Zürich have told me and may or may not be true. When ETH Zürich started its own computer science program in the 60s, buying computers from the US turned out to be a bit of an issue. They were expensive and often unsuitable for European use (what with our strange umlauts and stubborn