[fpc-devel] type discussion

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Jamie McCracken wrote:

> >>However, in general Pascal has poor developer productivity when
> >>compared to modern languages like python and C#.
> >
> >
> > In terms of _written_ or in terms of _working_ lines of code? :->

Can't stop refraining that fact ;-)

> Dont kid yourself - a lot of my fellow Delphi programmers have dumped it
> for C# already so it is really worrying for me espcially with borland
> being virtually bankrupt. Delphi as it is faces a bleak future so its
> looking increasingly like its time to modernise or die.

The attractivity of C# is a hype, and the current lack of able
programmers. The more complicated and error prone a language is, the
more programmers are required to make little bits work. This is why I
moved from Atari ST to MS-DOS and Windows, because there I could earn
more money with less efforts. The .NET thing and the # languages may
vanish in a few years, condemned to live forever as zombies in the
underground, like COBOL does :-(

The problem with perfect products is, that they cannot be improved any
more. Even if Delphi is far from being perfect, it cannot overcome some
bad inheritance from earlier language versions, and the elimination of
the remaining bugs costs more than the users are willing to pay for. In
so far it has reached a dead end, as a Windows specific development
system. But it still has a chance, when the next Delphi.NET version will
break backwards compatibility, and restarts with a better language
design, combining the goodies of Pascal, Modula, Oberon etc.

DoDi