[fpc-pascal] Who said Pascal isn't popular

[Paul Davidson]

If memory serves...  Microsoft for first few version of DOS used  
assembler.  This proved expensive for Microsoft as the number of  
people willing to program in intel assembler was quite limited.   
Microsoft kept hearing about this C programming language which  
students at MS were talking about.  It was essentially free and the  
number of people willing to program was high, and their cost (because  
they were students) was low.  Microsoft converted to C.

The reasons that C was popular was quite simple.  It was free to  
universities and colleges so professors did not have to pay compiler  
licenses to IBM, Xerox, Control Data, etc.  This made it quite popular  
with faculty.  C requires little or no discipline to program in.  So  
the typical zit faced 18 year old socially outcast student loved it as  
well.  The perfect eco-system :)

So like many things that originate from US (but not all) it was the  
law of the cheapest solution.  So today we have C, C++, and Java (a  
toilet trained version of C++) to use.

</Step_off_soap_box>


On 2009-10-16, at 12:58 PM, Jürgen Hestermann wrote:

>> You can post an ad for a C programmer and get 1,000 applicants, if  
>> you post an ad for a Pascal programmer you might get 5, at least  
>> where I live.
>
> Yes, that maybe true. But how has all this started? As far as I  
> know, C was not that popular in past (at least not on Windows).  
> Instead (Turbo) Pascal was a widely used language. Suddenly this  
> turned. May have come from Linux, where C was standard. I don't know.
>
>
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