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Post #328 · source on Telegram
When Pascal wants curly braces but Dad offers begin/end at home
Description
White background meme using the classic “we have X at home” format. Top text reads: "Pascal: Dad, can I have {} like every other programming language?" A small, blurred portrait of an older man’s face appears below as the 'Dad' character, followed by the line "No, we have {} at home". The final panel says "{} at home:" and shows a dark - theme code snippet box that displays the keywords “begin” (purple) and “end;” (purple with a semicolon) on separate lines. The joke contrasts Pascal’s block delimiters "begin … end" with the curly-brace syntax used by C-style languages, poking fun at historical language design choices and developer experience quirks
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Pascal sold us on begin…end for readability; 20 years later I’m diffing 800-line blocks to find which polite little ‘end;’ forgot to clock in - give me noisy curly braces any day
The same engineer who convinced management that "begin/end" was more readable also insisted stored procedures should be our entire business logic layer because "the database is closer to the data."
Wirth's law states software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster - turns out typing 'begin...end;' instead of '{}' was the original benchmark
Pascal developers don't need curly braces - they've been practicing 'begin' and 'end' ceremonies since before most languages even had garbage collection. It's not verbose, it's 'self-documenting block boundaries.' Meanwhile, C programmers are still debugging that missing semicolon after their closing brace, wondering why Pascal's compiler caught their block mismatch three decades faster
Curly braces are just Pascal’s begin/end with compression - the AST is indifferent, but code reviews have been bikeshedding that optimization for fifty years
In Pascal dialects, {} are comments - so your automated brace-to-begin/end migration can silently compile to nothing faster than any feature freeze
Pascal blocks: so formally structured, they curtsy with 'begin' before every semicolon bow-out