Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (2011)

Given development speed is way up, I'd be interested to see what a from-basic-principles simple and efficient OS and programming system might look like. Or people trying radically different versions of efficiency and simplicity, like an OS that uses an existing battle-tested sandboxed execution environment like v8 for userspace safety/isolation.

Fundamentally, many inefficiencies were justified for developer productivity, and I'm not sure that makes sense anymore, and the cost of larger projects with clear abstraction boundaries has plummetted.

▲

Isamu 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

>Fundamentally, many inefficiencies were justified for developer productivity, and I'm not sure that makes sense anymore

Having lived through this period, I would disagree, quite the opposite we tended to develop in C and assembly specifically for runtime efficiency because we had to.

For developer productivity you could opt for Lisp or SmallTalk or some such, which ran much slower until high quality compilers for these became available, and even then your target machine might only have a C compiler.

	▲	za_creature 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Specifically, turbo pascal was entirely written in assembly according to wikipedia (I recalled only 50% but maybe that was some other pascal dialect)

▲

pocketarc 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is the thing - when the cost of iterating and grinding compiler warnings drops to virtually 0, what new paradigms might we invent to exploit that? Rust gives us an inkling of an idea of what might be possible, but that still predates LLMs and thus still makes concession for human ergonomics. What are structures, guardrails, and patterns, that our OSs, frameworks, and toolchains can put in place, which would result in whole classes of problems going away completely, at the expense of massively increased (but mechanical, and easily automatable with a prompt) developer effort?

The next few years are going to be fun.

▲

za_creature 12 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I think you have that backwards.

It's the lack of clear abstraction boundaries that causes decreased developer productivity.

A code generator will not save you from Conway's law.

▲

jbellis 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anders Heljsberg GOAT. Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, TypeScript, just a phenomenal career marked with better taste than any other language designer I can think of, certainly any designer whose work is so mainstream.

▲

ilaksh 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is only slightly related but I just made a Turbo Vision UI for Claude Code sessions.

https://github.com/runvnc/tvclaude

	▲	andsoitis 24 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		cool. can you drag & drop in files (e.g. screenshots, PDFs, video recordings, text files, etc.) for context when you work on features or bug fixes? Cursor is great at workflows like that.

▲

bell-cot 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, yeah. Back in the mid-80's, software needed to be usable on a computer with a single 360KB floppy drive. (No HD, no SSD, no USB, no network, no ...) And even a big budget for RAM - which cost many orders of magnitude more than today - would really not get you around Bill Gates' 640KB DOS memory limit.

Comparing to current-day stuff is kinda like comparing battery-powered bathtub toys to jetskis.

▲

probably_wrong 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Those "bathtub toys" built the entire modern infrastructure, parts of which are still chugging along. If anything, I'd put the onus on software developers - like John Carmack said in 2005, "there is something deeply wrong when text editing on a 3.6 ghz processor is anything but instantaneous".

Software in the 80s showed what's possible when you really care about doing it. Software in the last 15 years feels like an exercise on what happens when you don't.

▲

BobBagwill 14 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

More like comparing a racing kayak to a leaky container ship burning sulfurous bunker fuel carrying a load of short-lived consumer junk. :-)

	▲	MonkeyClub a few seconds ago \| parent [-]
		Yet at the same time, one is a pastime for an affluent lifestyle while the other is driving the global economy. Interestingly, or ironically, the former was probably put on the shelves by means of the latter. If there is any positive progress to be made, the rethinking necessary must go much, much deeper than the superficial flesh of the problem, but there it’s bound to hit upon the sinews and bones of vested interests. In all, as I’m growing older and see the world trudge along the same lines it did centuries ago, I’m more and more pessimistic about the possibility of people agreeing that the sacrifices necessary will be made. Short-term stakeholder interests seem to trump any notions of longer-term greater good.

▲

haaz an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This article basically says that a text based application (turbo pascal) is smaller than images and PDFs. Obviously.

▲

MattCruikshank an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It's a full compiler and debugger. It's not at all obvious that it could be smaller than an image.

▲

mikestew 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

“Obviously”. Look, if you don’t really know what a development environment is, that’s okay. But a dismissive comment such as this makes it obvious to the rest of us that you don’t know, when I’m confident that isn’t your goal.

	▲	noir_lord 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If you want to be entertained have a look at their comment history. Their comment was entirely on brand.