Newbie introduction

[Krik00]

At school, we are learning Pascal language. As a future (possible) IT guy, can it help me? Or is it just useless language? What would be better for me to learn in my spare time?

[Bananasplit_00]

never heard of it, i would leard C or Java instead

[trag1c]

As far as being used in industry pascal would probably be useless but as with any programming it teaches logical problem solving. Which seems to be a rarity these days however it is a very important skill for anyone. Also learning a programming language opens up the door for learning more languages at an accelerated rate. This is the best part because it will help you learn languages that are useful to your industry.

[Edelrat]

Never heard of Pascal..

What you should learn depends on what you want to do..

If you want to manage Windows environments, Powershell is the way to go.

C can´t hurt either.

[Nuluvius]

3 minutes ago, trag1c said:

As far as being used in industry pascal would probably be useless but as with any programming it teaches logical problem solving. Which seems to be a rarity these days however it is a very important skill for anyone. Also learning a programming language opens up the door for learning more languages at an accelerated rate. This is the best part because it will help you learn languages that are useful to your industry.

This is exactly right.

 

(Turbo) Pascal/Delphi is (or are depending on where one sits philosophically) one of the multitude of languages that I know very well. It's very old now, predating C & C++ and was considered faster in that early era. Technical mastery of the language itself will unfortunately yield very little benefit in current industry as it's uses are usually limited to legacy maintenance (despite it's ongoing development by Embarcadero). That said you will however likely benefit from the theoretical implications much more so i.e. software engineering and design principals; and depending on what flavour and version of Pascal it is, experience with deterministic destruction, pointers, references and other forms of memory manipulation.

[Unimportant]

Just a FYI: Fanuc robots use a language called KAREL which is extremely close related to pascal. And some PLC's such as Beckhoff also use languages closely resembling pascal, so knowing it can have some uses.