(June 8, 2012 at 1:33 am)Moros Synackaon Wrote: Pascal and it's descendants are rather dead. Delphi was the most successful of the recent revisions. But without an ecosystem or similar languages, it's an isolated island.
Yep. Pascal, and later Modula-2 were my first "real" languages.
(June 8, 2012 at 1:33 am)Moros Synackaon Wrote: Citing C, the industries most popular language, is a rather silly comparison, dontchathink?
My comparison was largely tongue-in-cheek. I hear "we need to rewrite all of our [x] code in Java, because [x] is a dead language" all the time (where [x] is most often C). The truth of it is, the motivation is really because we have more competent Java developers than anything else. I'm really the only C guy - and if I get hit by a bus, they're screwed. Not because they couldn't hire someone to do the work, but due to the training time required to learn the application framework.
My view on it - bite the bullet and take the time required to properly train a backup person, or to build a Java framework and deploy new functionality in Java (they're in-house proprietary apps). The legacy stuff will eventually become obsolete and need not be rewritten - they rarely get touched once deployed, and it doesn't take much of a C programmer to fix whatever bugs are discovered.
