[fpc-pascal] Hello, new Pascal programmer. had a question!

[Liam Proven]

On Sun, 29 Aug 2021 at 15:26, Bart via fpc-pascal
<fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org> wrote:
>
> So, if you're on Windows, *nix or a Mac, my advice is to use Lazarus
> as your IDE of choice.

I see where you are coming from, I think, but I can relate to the OP.

I played with Pascal at university, and in my first job -- I wrote a
Quicklife program and some fractal generators and things. TurboPascal
was a good language, approachable and easy to understand.

But Delphi was, to me, utterly impenetrable. It's not really Pascal
any more: it's a confusing forms-based 4GL which happens to have a
scripting language with Pascal syntax. I am not really interested in
writing GUI apps. I'm just an amateur playing around and all the OOPS
stuff blew my brain.

I'm sure it's good and helpful for professionals, or even for skilled
amateurs, but as a dabbler, it took a reasonably accessible language,
far more readable than C, and made it overcomplicated and obscure and
complex and basically just too damned hard for me.

I've got Lazarus running here and it's more of the same. But I
discovered that I have `fpc` in the terminal and I had a "Hello world"
program running in 30 seconds there... something that took hours in
Delphi.

Plain old FreePascal is approachable. Object Pascal is deeply
intimidating, and I'm not sure it's worth the entry price.

-- 
Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053