[fpc-pascal] Fwd: What to do to get new users

[Nikolay Nikolov]

On 10/16/24 6:00 AM, Hairy Pixels via fpc-pascal wrote:
> 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.
What trends, exactly? Can you be more specific?
> 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).
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?
> 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.

Do you have a garbage collection proposal for Pascal?

Free Pascal has a JVM target that supports garbage collection and pretty 
much nobody is using it. Why do you think that is?

> 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.
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.
>
> Too many details to go into but there’s myriad problems that would 
> need to be addressed.

Unlike others, your post is so negative and so vague and light in 
details it almost looks like trolling.

Best regards,

Nikolay

>
> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> From: Rainer Stratmann via fpc-pascal <fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org>
> Date: Oct 16, 2024 at 6:07:58 AM
> Subject: [fpc-pascal] What to do to get new users
> To: FPC mailing list <fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org>
> Cc: Rainer Stratmann <rainerstratmann at t-online.de>
>
>
> At the Lazarus Congress in Cologne in October 2024, it ended up being very
> interesting. An important question came up.
>
> Why are no new users coming to Lazarus/Freepascal?
> Why do we find it so difficult?
> How can we get new, younger users to come to us?
>
> _______________________________________________
> fpc-pascal maillist  -fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org
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