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

[Henry Vermaak]

2009/10/16 Marco van de Voort <marcov at stack.nl>:
> In our previous episode, Jürgen Hestermann said:
>> > 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.
>
> As far as I saw it, it was simple:
>
> - C was used in IT, specially in America.
> - Pascal was used in engineering and science, specially  in Europe.
>
> Engineering stopped programming by hand, and moved to Matlab and more
> specialized tools. Moreover, there was a consolidation in IT, and many of
> the surviving companies were American, with a C/C++ legacy.

The thing that cuts it for me, at least, is that in linux, if you need
to hack the kernel, drivers, bootloader, or even just use anything in
/dev, it's a lot easier to use c.  Also, it targets a greater number
of architectures.  We've made the mistake of writing code in pascal
that we later needed to port, but had to re-write.  It's come a long
way, though, and armel port seems to be quite usable nowadays.

Henry