Freepascal will never become popular in a world where JavaScript is
everywhere, Delphi exists & Pascal has a reputation of not cool
programming language.
I don't think Delphi existing should be your main concern. It's a
miracle it still exists right now and it has clients. I still use it as
a "hey, this is what the Pascal community can achieve" argument, after
telling people about Free Pascal (and rarely PascalABC.NET and Oxygene).
True, Free Pascal will never be "popular" (not like Delphi is
either...), but it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to promote it. Also, we
can capitalize off of JS being popular, since we have Pas2JS. That's
what Scala has done with Scala.JS, Clojure with ClojureScript, Ocamljs,
Smart Mobile Studio (even Pascal can market itself properly), Ruby with
Opal etc. People really don't want to deal with writing JS (look at how
many people choose TypeScript and back in ye olde days it was
CoffeeScript), so we can offer a viable alternative. Instead of denying
the reality around us (we're just a small school of fish (yes, that's
the proper name) in the large Programming Sea, so we won't do a lot), we
can try to mold around the current environment and take advantage of it
and market ourselves that way. It's easier to convince already existing
Pascal programmers that have done Turbo Pascal since the dawn of time
than new people, and the latter group is what we should be focusing on.
Lazarus does not look complicated. It has it own distinctive look & feel.
User
should be able to completely detach windows from from main so it would be
possible to move them to different monitor, virtual desktop & freely move
on monitor.
You might've not realized that, but this is *foreign* and totally
different from how most IDEs out there function. If you're familiar with
Delphi 7 and lower, great, this feels natural, but the problem is that
other IDEs aren't like Delphi 7. Lazarus is still stuck in that era, and
that's /fine/ (at least, as far as the old Pascal devs are concerned),
but I see most people around me (beginners and otherwise) immediately
dock the IDE or ask me how to do it. Not to mention that it immediately
fails to function for tiling window managers. And "distinctive look and
feel" doesn't mean said look and feel is intuitive. I believe it would
be better if Lazarus was docked by default and give the option to easily
undock it, because far more beginners or curious people would want to
dock it, it's a better default. If you don't believe me, please look at
as many IDEs as you can and tell me *one* that's undocked like Lazarus
is. It genuinely is something unusual and jarring to newcomers. Maybe
there's a reason most other IDEs are docked, and even if you disagree
with that particular decision, it would be hard to deny the reality that
it's how people expect IDEs today to be structured. Even *RAD Studio*
gave up on the idea. Happy birthday 2002!
--
Stefan-Iulian Alecu
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