[fpc-pascal] [OT] Sven, don't defect to the dark side!

[Sven Barth]

First and foremost: this is very offtopic, so I'm moving this over to 
fpc-other. If someone answers to my mail, then please ensure that you 
only answer to fpc-pascal. Thank you.

On 12.03.2013 13:57, Reinier Olislagers wrote:
> Sad enough that you're almost no student anymore (presumably equals
> having to do real work instead of improving FPC and incidentally
> studying),

I'm really looking forward to the time I'm no student anymore. First I'm 
finally able to earn a nice amount of money and second I'll have 
regulated worktimes and don't need to use my free time (aka FPC time) to 
do homework or other things for university. This will finally be the 
time when the *real* fun on FPC development starts. :D

> but this is really going to far ;) :
>
> http://www.reactos.org/archives/public/ros-dev/2013-March/016063.html
>
> Don't leave us - rather leave these C people to do whatever they do ;)

Where did I wrote that I'd leave FPC? If you'd read the ReactOS forums 
as well you'd know that I'm happily promoting that I'm a FPC developer 
when there is the chance... [Note: I'm aware that you're joking around, 
so don't take the "tone" of the previous paragraph to personally ^^]

Nevertheless I like ReactOS very much. I'm a huge fan of the NT kernel 
(just in case: I'm not talking about the Win32 API here) and one of my 
dreams would be a new NT subsystem written in FPC with an as much as 
possible Pascal userland (why do you think I implemented the NativeNT 
target?). And if you look at the projects they are suggesting for GSOC 
2013 there are very nice ones between them. The ones I personally would 
consider myself able to implement (the SSH server and the GUI installer) 
could even be implemented in Pascal (though this wouldn't help the 
ReactOS devs). So while this leaves out the GUI installer a SSH server 
for Windows and ReactOS could nevertheless be implemented independently 
of GSOC and the ReactOS project as a Pascal open source project...
Things that I'd also like to see for ReactOS would be a port of DDEkit 
which would allow the usage of Linux drivers (compiled from source) on a 
NT system and just because "I could" a port of ReactOS to m68k (this 
would need some more work though than "just" porting the OS, e.g. 
patching the binutils and maybe gcc...).

But there is also another side of the story though this is not related 
to the mail linked above: As my current company has (again) decided to 
move away from Delphi (to .Net with C#) I myself will very likely change 
my workplace at the end of my study as well. And the company I plan to 
work for is developing their own realtime microkernel operating system 
though they are working with C++. But they are also supportive of my 
work with FPC. The boss originally developed in Pascal as well and 
during the time I wrote my bachelor thesis for them two years ago I 
managed to port FPC natively to their POSIX layer as the first compiler 
ever. :) And I'll at least try if I could get a bit of time a week to be 
paid for work on FPC. And who knows... maybe I'll someday rewrite their 
kernel in Pascal :P
Also it might be useful to use a different language for work than for 
hobby: you learn to appreciate your main language more (or in case of 
C++ more importantly the IDE...).

And to close this mail I'll misuse the famous quote of an even more 
famous half-Vulcan:

I was and always shall be: a Pascal programmer.

Regards,
Sven