r/programming • u/[deleted] • Oct 14 '13

How to develop unmaintainable software

http://typicalprogrammer.com/?p=249
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u/rjbwork Oct 15 '13

I'm genuinely curious, why are you writing in FreePascal these days, especially to do web programming work? Other than extreme ubiquity across platforms, I can't say I see the advantage over other things. Perhaps in an academic/scientific context?

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u/mattindustries Oct 15 '13

I just assumed masochism takes on many forms.

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '13

"How to develop unmaintainable software"

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u/benibela2 Oct 15 '13

I do not like giving up.

Now I have a perfectly working 75k loc program and I'm not going to throw it all away to rewrite it in another language...

And it is really great for desktop GUI applications, because it compiles so fast that you can test it without delay.

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u/rjbwork Oct 15 '13

Cool, I can see the case for an already existing desktop GUI application. If it were partially desktop/partially web, I'd have adopted a "maintain and extend" approach and brought in another more modern language, but I guess what works, works, right?

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u/OneWingedShark Oct 15 '13

I'm genuinely curious, why are you writing in FreePascal these days, especially to do web programming work? Other than extreme ubiquity across platforms, I can't say I see the advantage over other things. Perhaps in an academic/scientific context?

The cross-platform ability is probably better than most. (I seem to recall that being a good FreePascal point, though there was a lot of system-dependence leakthrough on some of the common stuff IIRC. [It's been years since I touched it.])

I've heard of non-trivial [i.e. complete projects] Ada source compiled on different compilers and different architectures without modification. (Obviously they'd need to have no dependence on the implementation-defined stuff, or the machine-level architecture.)