Pascal, what are your thoughts?

Hi, guys!

Past few weeks I've been tutoring some of my friends, that are studying pedagogy and they will teach computer science in high schools. At our uni, they learn Pascal, instead of C++, Java and Haskell, that we, regular CS students need to master. They say, it's because Pascal is still the main language of our high schools and that it's best for high school students to learn.

That seems a bit odd to me. Isn't pascal pretty much dead nowadays? Aren't there better languages to teach students basics and thinking in algorithms? I'd say that Python is much easier to understand, to write and also is much more useful in today's programming. What do you think, community? :)

Pascal is not dead, it is useful for teaching, because it is a good example of a verbal language with many keywords. It lacks almost any support beyond that. There is a "fork"(i think) of it called delphi. Now that is (atleast was) used for even corporate development. But overall it's not used much anyways.

When I asked people in the education field, they said, that high school students had to be taught pascal (instead of C) was because it was easier to learn, and that it expands analytical thinking. I think, that it's load of bs, because Python is simpler and accomplishes the same, and modern languages are comparatively the same level of difficulty (I mean, for what they use... Finding knight's tour is the same level of difficulty in Pascal, Java, C,...) Why then, not teach them something that is widely known and used? Well, apart from our education system being hopelessly outdated.

For the purpose of teaching basics of programming, Pascal is not in any way bad. When it comes to basics, there's no reason to use a language that is used in practice, as you are not going to write anything practically useful anyway.

And when you know basics, nothing prevents you from quickly learning whichever language you need for a particular task.

Anyway, starting with pascal is way better than starting with, for example, pure C, as all particulars of the syntax that you have to remember, obstruct the core idea that you are trying to teach.

Not that I think that there's any merit in teaching non-programmers programming. This is actually a sign of a bad education system.

Pascal is something that I'd almost rather be used to teach me how to program.

Currently they're teaching those of us interested at my high school on java, with a program layered over that doesn't really show us how code actually works in practice. (There is a full javascript class, but they require at least one semester of pre cal and the intro class that im taking now.)

(we're using alice 2.4, which if you don't know is an open source software that primarily teaches you how to code by you building scenes and then using blocks to create animations, or use input blocks to create basic interaction. We never see any of the actual code, just the blocks.)

The issue with something like java is that it is a lot harder to teach on then something like python. I say python because I have used it partially before and it looks like it would be a lot easier for us to learn and get experienced on. Pascal is probably the same way.

The thing is, they have (almost) the same lectures we take... But the thing is, in our country there are high schools, that are aimed at practical CS knowledge - They go to work (often programming) as soon, as they leave the school. That means, that given that most jobs require Java/C/Web technologies, that are not taught at our schools, they have to either pay for private lectures, or study in their free time, even though they went to a CS-specialized high school.

I'd rather get thrown into a job without knowing the language beforehand, than learn a bunch of languages and theory without being guaranteed a job (and getting an internship being almost impossible).

Practical experience is more important anyway.

back before the millennium bug didn’t shut down the world, I was learning Pascal at college (uk education system = primary school, secondary school, college, university) and it was good. The key things I learnt where schematic logic and how to think programmaticly, which can be applied to any language. Pascal was fun, but given the lack of real wold use today, I can only imagine how little there is out in the digital world for you to learn from or apply your code to.

However I clearly remember being told in the first week of uni that my uni did have state of the art IT systems and services, but they got rid of it and replaced it with a collection of ropey P1's and some clunky consoles because when you work in the real world, very few business’s have state of the art, normally you end up working with something that is really old and just always worked (IBM AS400's :) )

best regards

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Wow, haven't touched Pascal since I finished my degree, over 25 years ago. I still have a
copy of Boarland turbo Pascal. The entire dev package, IDE and
compiler fits on 1 3.5 inch 720kb floppy disk.

Great learning language, or it was for procedural coding, not sure how it would fit
in with OOP thinking and the newer MCV approach.