[antranigv]

For people who are going to ask "Do people still use pascal?", long story short-> yes they do, and Free Pascal Compiler is not only the traditional Pascal that we used to lean in school, it's also an Object Pascal compiler, and has many many libraries for modern programming :)) I started learning programming with Pascal when I was a child, it helped me to understand many things, lately I had a look at Python, which I love it a lot, but when I took a look back at Pascal (Object Pascal this time) I understood that everyone should start programming with Object Pascal and learn about the basics (then use what ever you want, .NET, Java, C++, Ada, etc). BUT I found out about this amazing language Oberon-2, and I should say that in schools we should move not to Python/Java, but to Oberon-2 (it's again a Wirthian language). Sorry for my bad English, just wanted to share my view, and I'd like also to say that (IMHO) making GUI programs using Lazarus is much easier than, well, anything else :))

[pjmlp]

If you want to dive into the world of Oberon you should check the PDFs available at Niklaus Wirth web site and AOS.

http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/books.html

http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/Front

You can also have a look how the OS used at ETHZ were like:

http://progtools.org/article.php?name=oberon&section=compile...

We already had it quite good on the PC with Turbo Pascal and later Delphi, which is why I find a bit sad that it took us almost 20 years to get .NET Native, instead of it being the default toolchain from day one.

[iheartmemcache]

To be fair, most of the benchmarks I've seen from end-users don't have .NET Native outperforming the CLR except in huge number crunching situations[1,2]. As one would imagine in those scenarios using your standard stack of C++ with the GNU GSL[3] (which includes your BLAS, GMP, PDE, and standard lin. alg. stuff) is still pretty much king with MPL (based on MPI) with some (often modest, sometimes incredible OpenCL gains). In numerical methods, Fortran w/ a modern Intel MKL and MPI still reign for SIMD. I guess what I'm saying is, for your day to day Rapid App Dev (which Borland Delphi + the VCL was absolutely king at up until MS put out Lightswitch) you weren't really crunching away. Likewise, especially with modern JIT'ing if you _do_ crunch with a language that hit's the CLR hard, you still get performance similar to .NET Native (contrary to MS claims of "performance similar to C++). I've been a MS advocate for ages and admire what they've been doing since ~2005 at MSR all the way to the production cash cows[MS SQL Standard gives you a ~LOT~ of bang for your buck with SSDT/SSAS/SSRS] (check my 8 year post history - when everyone was rails rails! iOS! MBP!! I was silently C#3'ing along); I say all this as a long preface to pose this question - what exactly did .NET Native bring that presumably made it catch up to TP/Delphi?

[1] http://code4k.blogspot.com/2014/06/micro-benchmarking-net-na... [2] https://dzone.com/articles/net-native-performance-and [3] http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/

[mhd]

Oberon was actually used in a couple of German universities, not just because of the language, but because of the whole environment (which feels a bit like SmallTalk for bit-twiddlers and -shavers).

Having said that, Oberon is a pretty strict and bare language compared to others, e.g. in its current standard, the old structured programming rule of one return statement per function is strictly enforced. Whether that's an advantage for teaching or not, I can't really say.

[PeCaN]

Sometimes I think strict and bare is better, especially for learning. One of the reasons I like C so much is that it makes doing complicated things really hard, so you end up solving problems in simple ways instead. Bare languages really force you to understand and think through your problem.