[fpc-pascal] Does FPC 2.8.0 can actually still be called Pascal ?

[Sven Barth]

On 28.02.2013 15:40, Reimar Grabowski wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Feb 2013 10:56:42 +0100
> Sven Barth <pascaldragon at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> As others already said: There are components or frameworks out there
>> that use modern Delphi features or frameworks of other languages that
>> make use of such features. Example: DSpring, which is a Delphi
>> dependency injection framework.
> I did not find DSpring. Do you mean Spring4D? If this is the case I'd rather stay with the real thing (meaning Spring Framework for Java).

Yes, sorry, I did indeed mean Spring4D. And staying with the real thing 
does only help if you use Java...

>> By implementing them we can attract developers which got used to such features and swear that
>> they can simplyfy work.
> This I highly doubt. Why should I change languages only because FPC now has a feature that I already have in Java/Ruby/Groovy/etc and leave all the libraries and frameworks behind to get win32 only frameworks that are chasing the features of the multiplatform ones I left?
> If you are not a Pascal guy you won't become one just because FPC supports closures or dependency injection or whatever.

There are people that aren't as fixed with their programming language as 
me (though I DO use C/C++ or even Java if the need exists...) and do 
take a look here and then for other languages, because they might be 
unhappy with a few things. I have a friend for example who is - in his 
company - a PHP developer (and he likes it), but when he started a 
bigger hobby project he had taken a look at Free Pascal and liked it.

> Delphi is trying hard to stay relevant and so is FPC by following because becoming too different to Delphi will make the community quite a bit smaller. That's all there is to the new features. Pascal is a niche language and will stay one. There won't be the year of Pascal and suddenly thousands of developers start using it. You may write the next Facebook in FPC and it won't matter.

The interesting thing is how long can we afford to follow Delphi? They 
added a {$ZEROBASEDSTRINGS} directive in XE3, added type helpers (they 
didn't just add them because of nothing) and seem to want to add 
automatic reference counting to TObject. Put this together with them 
developing a completely new compiler and this *might* lead to them 
dropping backwards compatibility. This event would be - in my opinion - 
where we definitely need to stop swimming in their backwash and steer free.

Regards,
Sven