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<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Oct 16, 2024 at 4:44:35 PM, Nikolay Nikolov via fpc-pascal <<a href="mailto:fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org">fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org</a>> wrote:<br></div>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 10/16/24 6:00 AM, Hairy Pixels via
fpc-pascal wrote:<br>
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<div dir="ltr">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.</div>
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What trends, exactly? Can you be more specific?<br></div></div></blockquote><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote" dir="ltr">The biggest thing I see stopping new programmers from using Pascal is some form of automatic memory management. ARC, garbage collector, smart pointers or even RAII. That right there is a killer if you ask me. Even people who want to high performance will use C++ instead of Pascal for this reason.</div><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex" type="cite"><div><div>
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<div dir="ltr">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).</div>
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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?<br></div></div></blockquote><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote" dir="ltr">It’s no one's fault there’s just not enough people working on these things. I tried to make a language server and a plugin even for VSCode but it’s hard to use and not clear for new users. Sorry I dont’ have the time either.</div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex" type="cite"><div><div>
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<div dir="ltr">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.</div>
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<p>Do you have a garbage collection proposal for Pascal?</p>
<p>Free Pascal has a JVM target that supports garbage collection and
pretty much nobody is using it. Why do you think that is?</p></div></div></blockquote><div class="gmail_quote" dir="ltr">I don’t even know how to use that! I assume it’s not something you just enable on any program. I’ve never seen programs adopt it.</div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex" type="cite"><div><div>
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<div dir="ltr">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.</div>
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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.<br></div></div></blockquote><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote" dir="ltr">Swift has a ton of features that Pascal doesn’t have which the kind UI apps which Apple supports. We could spend hours going over everything but I’m just saying a new programmer would look at Swift vs Pascal and choose Swift.</div><div class="gmail_quote" dir="ltr"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote" dir="ltr">The bigger problem is of course support for Apples frameworks. Once the platform chooses a language like Apple does it kind of kills everything else. Even popular languages like C# don’t compete so I don’t expect Pascal to come out ahead her either.</div><div class="gmail_quote" dir="ltr"><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex" type="cite"><div><div>
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<div dir="ltr">Too many details to go into but there’s myriad
problems that would need to be addressed. <br>
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<p>Unlike others, your post is so negative and so vague and light in
details it almost looks like trolling.</p></div></div></blockquote><div class="gmail_quote" dir="ltr">Sorry to be negative I’m just sounding the alarm. I’ve watched the community dwindle over the years and people move on and new programmers adopt new languages. It’s clearly going in the wrong direction as noted by the original post. Am I wrong?</div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex" type="cite"><div><div>
<p>Best regards,</p>
<p>Nikolay<br>
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<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">---------- Forwarded message
---------<br>
From: Rainer Stratmann via fpc-pascal <<a href="mailto:fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org</a>><br>
Date: Oct 16, 2024 at 6:07:58 AM<br>
Subject: [fpc-pascal] What to do to get new users<br>
To: FPC mailing list <<a href="mailto:fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org</a>><br>
Cc: Rainer Stratmann <<a href="mailto:rainerstratmann@t-online.de" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">rainerstratmann@t-online.de</a>></div>
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At the Lazarus Congress in Cologne in October 2024, it ended up
being very<br>
interesting. An important question came up.<br>
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Why are no new users coming to Lazarus/Freepascal?<br>
Why do we find it so difficult?<br>
How can we get new, younger users to come to us?<br>
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fpc-pascal maillist - <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org">fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org</a>
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_______________________________________________<br>fpc-pascal maillist - <a href="mailto:fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org">fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org</a><br><a href="https://lists.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal">https://lists.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal</a><br>
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