If you were asked to make an e-commerce website in 2025, what language would you reach for? Show of hands: JavaScript? Go? Pascal? Well, there was at least one taker for that last one: [jns], and he has an hour-long tutorial video showing you how he made it happen.
The site in question is the web store for his personal business, Photronic Arts, so you cannot say [jns] does not have skin in the game. From the front end, this is HTML and could be anything upto and including Shopify under the hood. It’s not, though: it’s a wholly custom backend [jns] put together in FreePascal, using the Lazarus IDE.
There’s a case to be made for Pascal in the modern day, but when we wrote that we weren’t expecting to get tips about web development. Ironically enough [jns] spends so much time giving the technical details in this video he doesn’t delve that deeply into why he chose FreePascal, especially when it’s clear he’s very familiar with C and C++. In his associated writeup on his Gopher page (link though Floodgap) [jns] simply declares it’s a language he’s quite fond of, which is reason enough of us. The source code is available, though on request, to avoid AI scraping. It’s a sad but understandable response to these modern times.
If you’re not into web development and want to see a deep-dive into how the backend works, this video is worth watching even if you don’t particularly care for Pascal. It’s also worth watching if you do know backend development, and are Pascal-curious. If neither of those things interest you, what about this Pascal Library for Arduino?
Thanks to [jns] for the tip! If you’re doing modern work with questionably-modern tools, we call that a hack and would love to hear from you.
Still doesn’t change the fact it’s a dead language.
PLC structured text is arguably a Pascal variant, and very much alive.
Mostly Micropython these days, but I’m fond of Pascal, as well. . .
Borland Turbo Pascal on an 8088 outright screams.
Here in Germany, I think, Turbo Pascal 6/7 and Borland Pascal 7 were still popular throughout the 90s.
Not on 8088 PCs, but 286-586 PCs with Super VGA graphics, CD-ROM drive and soundcards.
The many BGI drivers really helped to make Turbo Pascal programs run fine on any system.
Thanks to the Turbo Vision environment, many professional looking applications had been written at the time.
On Windows, Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.0/1.5 and Borland Pascal 7 Windows allowed easy development.
There even was a WinCRT unit that allowed porting DOS text-mode applications to Windows.
TPW and BPW were the pre-runners to Delphi 1.0 in many ways.
Delphi 1.0 still supported the old OWL, besides the new VCL.
But yeah, I understand, many oldtimers had used Turbo Pascal 3 in mid-80s for uni. On an old dino PC..
It’s the classic version that would create tiny COM files on DOS an CP/M systems.
The later Turbo Pascal 4 with Turbo Grafx add-on was a totally different beast, though.
It could create EXE files for writing complex applications.
It was when Turbo Pascal got more user friendly and more flexible.
It’s not a dead language – indeed lazarus is what all the schools and unis should be using to teach programming.
Why did he use it instead of c++? I find I tend to use lazarus for gui things, as there hasn’t been a useful integrated gui/ide for c++ on the market since Builder c++ version 6 (all later versions suck). In fact, I’ve written back ends in rust or c++, and front ends that talk to them in lazarus, quite a bit recently..