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What was the deal with Pascal as a computer language back in the day?  We learned it in HS in one of my computer classes, and it seems like it was popular to teach.  By the time I got in college, they were teaching mostly C. I have a vague memory of taking a class that taught C, but for the life of me I can't remember if it was a class about C or if C was part of the class.  About 30 years ago to my reckoning (29 to be more exact) so the memory is a little fuzzy. 

Anyways, I think Pascal as a language died out.  

It's laughable because somewhat recently I was helping somebody in their early 20's do something on the computer, and I was CTRL-X and CTRL-C and CTRL-P and they were looking at me really weird.  I asked them what was wrong, and they were bewildered at my keystroke short cuts.  I had to show them how to copy, paste, cut, etc using the keyboard shortcuts.  They had no clue.  We learned computers with no mouse years ago, so keyboard shortcuts were the norm.  

What was the deal with Pascal as a computer language back in the day?  We learned it in HS in one of my computer classes, and it seems like it was popular to teach.  By the time I got in college, they were teaching mostly C. I have a vague memory of taking a class that taught C, but for the life of me I can't remember if it was a class about C or if C was part of the class.  About 30 years ago to my reckoning (29 to be more exact) so the memory is a little fuzzy.

Anyways, I think Pascal as a language died out. 

My senior year of high school I signed up for a programming class, which taught Turbo Pascal.  It was a disaster, and I learned nothing.  I kind of regret not going to school for programming, because the little bit I can do these days, I really enjoy.  I might have liked working on larger projects, who knows.  But that experience really put me off of it and kind of killed my confidence.  

It was a tele-learning class, and we just had a proctor in the room, as our little high school had no teachers qualified to teach any kind of programming.  There was a terminal and the instructor, a professor at Northwestern State, had the ability to share his screen with us and the other 5 schools online with us.  We could hear him and had mics to ask questions, but we couldn't see him, and he was Asian and extremely hard to understand, so it was already less than ideal.  

The biggest issue was that class met every day, but our high school had switched that year to an alternating schedule they called A and B days.  Instead of 1st period through 7th period every day, A Days were longer classes of 1st, 3rd, and 5th periods, B Days were longer classes of 2nd, 4th, and 6th periods, and both days had 7th period for the same amount of time as always.  Since that class was not taught during 7th period, we only got every other day's worth of class with the instructor.  We were literally missing half of our classes.  We were all doing horribly, not understanding anything, and when we complained to the Principle, he sat in on a class and said he didn't see the problem, it seemed like we could hear the instructor and see his screen just fine.  He completely missed the point about "Yeah, but what about all the classes he's teaching when we're not here?"  In retrospect, he probably understood, but the decision had likely been made at the Parish School Board level and there wasn't anything he could do about it.

I'm not saying that studying overtime and really kicking it into the highest possible gear couldn't have overcome that.  But I am saying most of us weren't the type to learn programming on our own at 17 years old, and we all basically got sympathy-D's.  We earned F's, undoubtedly.  I learned nothing about Turbo Pascal because I was lost by the second week of class.  

I would expect that it was probably popular to teach because it was a much more "modern" programming language than BASIC. I've always viewed teaching programming as largely being separate from the language selected, because fundamentally you're teaching concepts. BASIC didn't have enough on its bones beyond very simple stuff. But Pascal had enough to teach from.

IMHO schools (especially high schools) probably kept using it at the time over C because it was more mature, there were textbooks/resources to use [and re-use each year], etc. It takes a lot more effort for a HS computer class teacher to learn a new language and then develop a teaching curriculum around it rather than just teaching the same stuff they'd used for the last 5+ years. I suspect that's why I learned Pascal in the mid-90s in HS, even though C had probably largely displaced it commercially by then.

Oddly enough I learned C, assembly, and some scripting languages in college, but never C++ or object-oriented programming. To this day I don't really know what OOP is

Yeah this all sounds about right to me.

I learned Pascal in high school (and then took the class but already knew it in college), but I never used it.  But, it was widely used for application programming in the 70s and 80s.

I used C and C++ quite a bit in my professional career, and had to teach myself.  It wasn't difficult, programming languages all use the same general commands and structures.  The syntax obviously differs and some are more rigidly structured than others, but at their core they all must do the same types of things once compiled for the CPU, so they can't really differ all that much.



 

Oddly enough I learned C, assembly, and some scripting languages in college, but never C++ or object-oriented programming. To this day I don't really know what OOP is

Hey, I might have found a place where I have a nerd-leg up on you! 

I'm a bit murkier on the more general concept, but functionally and applicably, regarding data visualization, I do know something about it.  I often use a python module called Matplotlib to visualize data, and there's basically two ways to code when using it.  You can do Matlab style, which was the language where Matplotlib originally came from, or OOP style.  They achieve exactly the same thing, it's just that Python treats the road to get there a little differently. 

Of course, Python is really just running C++ under the hood. 

Oh yeah I had to use Matlab to process output data from various labs throughout college.  Just remembered that.

And most scripting languages are just shortform versions of C or Pascal or some other high level language.   Primary difference is that scripting languages are interpreted real time and the high level languages are compiled for quicker and more efficient final operation.