On 10/16/24 6:00 AM, Hairy Pixels via fpc-pascal wrote:
FPC is not keeping up with trends in the industry which new
programmings want despite all the older programmers who are settled in
their ways. Even if there is a market for Lazarus type apps people in
2024 don’t want to use a massive legacy IDE and prefer better tools
like VSCode.
What trends, exactly? Can you be more specific?
If you want to use FPC these days what does a new user do? If they
follow tutorials on YouTube they expect to have some VSCode package
installed easily and start working that way. FPC of course has no
official support for this and it’s hard to get my language server and
it’s buggy due to CodeTools (a user created project with no official
backing AFAIK).
If you think that way, then maybe create your own VSCode plugin for
Pascal. What "official backing" do you expect, exactly? There's no such
thing as "official backing". There are things that users care enough
about to donate their development time and work on them. That's how open
source works. How is it CodeTools' fault that your language server is
buggy? Did you submit merge requests with fixes? Did they get rejected?
As for the language I think for GUI apps programmers don’t need or
want a manual memory managed language like Pascal and would prefer
something like C#. In general the ease of programming is not there in
Pascal compared to other languages and the community is extremely
resistant to change.
Do you have a garbage collection proposal for Pascal?
Free Pascal has a JVM target that supports garbage collection and pretty
much nobody is using it. Why do you think that is?
I don’t think it’s hard to see Pascal are simply going to get old and
die at this point. I even had an old time programmer contact me and
say how much more productive he is with Swift when writing macOS apps
now so quit using FPC. There’s lots of reason for this so FPC would
need to be actively learning and making changes to keep pace.
One developer moving from one language to another is pretty anecdotal.
IMO, Swift is a pretty decent language, but there's nothing entirely
original or amazing for Object Pascal developers. It's an improvement
over C, C++, Objective C, etc, but not so much over Object Pascal. What
is it about Swift, that makes your old time friend more productive when
writing macOS apps? Is it really the language, or is it the Apple IDE
and framework? If it's the latter, there's a cost to that, your app
isn't multiplatform, you need to rewrite it, if you want to support
other platforms. Apple has no incentive in making that process easy.
Too many details to go into but there’s myriad problems that would
need to be addressed.
Unlike others, your post is so negative and so vague and light in
details it almost looks like trolling.
Best regards,
Nikolay
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Rainer Stratmann via fpc-pascal <fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org>
Date: Oct 16, 2024 at 6:07:58 AM
Subject: [fpc-pascal] What to do to get new users
To: FPC mailing list <fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org>
Cc: Rainer Stratmann <rainerstratm...@t-online.de>
At the Lazarus Congress in Cologne in October 2024, it ended up being very
interesting. An important question came up.
Why are no new users coming to Lazarus/Freepascal?
Why do we find it so difficult?
How can we get new, younger users to come to us?
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