Ask Paul: January 20 (Premium)

Hola from Mexico City, Mexico. My wife and I are heading to Puebla tomorrow, so Ask Paul is a day earlier than usual. Let’s dive in.
Pascal
erichk asks:

Paul, you were a big Pascal guy from what I can tell. I've recently started messing with it again. I'll cut to the chase: Were you equally as frustrated by the semicolon requirements? My gosh, I thought C was tricky, but Pascal takes it to another level.

I’m curious what environment you’re using and, I guess, why you are doing this. But the short version is that Pascal was specifically designed to “encourage” good programming practices, which is a cute way of saying that it demands good programming practices. And among the ways it does this is via its strict programming style (and strict type checking) requirements. Like most people, I started with BASIC, but Pascal was my second language, and I came to really appreciate its strictness. You can kind of follow a linear path from C to JavaScript in the opposite direction. Classic Visual Basic was also ridiculous in many ways, as a language.

This isn’t related to your question per se, but my first introduction to Pascal was via a high school teacher who was so terrible I started zoning out and did poorly in the class. Years later, I experienced Apple Pascal via the Apple IIGS and then Borland Turbo Pascal for MS-DOS, and that renewed my interest. And years after that, after having used Visual Basic and Visual C++, I was introduced to Borland Delphi and its Object Pascal language. Gary, my mentor, was so impressed by this that we went on to write the Delphi 3 SuperBible. I wanted to send that old high school a copy.

I don’t have a very wide experience with modern programming languages, but as a logical, C-based evolution of Object Pascal, I feel like C# lands at about the right place with regards to style and requirements. That it was created by the genius who co-created Turbo Pascal and Delphi is perhaps not coincidental.
Activision aftershocks
sabertooth920 asks:

Sony may have been hurt by the Activision purchase, but, is the real loser Google. Had they bought Activision it would have made Stadia instantly relevant. It’s a shame, the technology behind it is excellent, but in typical Google fashion, they didn’t go all in.

I was saying on Windows Weekly this week that 2022 is going to be busy year for the videogame market and that Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard will have many, many ripple effects. With regards to Stadia specifically, yeah, Google’s usual hands-off nonchalance isn’t going to cut it, and there are already signs that the firm is moving away from a direct consumer offering to using Stadia as the back-end technology for third-party services. The irony, of course, is that Stadia, technically, is really good.

But one senses that Google isn’t all-in. That Google/Stadia has never come up as being interested in Activision is telling, I think.
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