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

[Hairy Pixels]

On Oct 16, 2024 at 4:44:35 PM, Nikolay Nikolov via fpc-pascal <
fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org> wrote:

>
> 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?
>

The biggest thing I see stopping new programmers from using Pascal is some
form of automatic memory management. ARC, garbage collector, smart pointers
or even RAII. That right there is a killer if you ask me. Even people who
want to high performance will use C++ instead of Pascal for this reason.


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?
>

It’s no one's fault there’s just not enough people working on these things.
I tried to make a language server and a plugin even for VSCode but it’s
hard to use and not clear for new users. Sorry I dont’ have the time
 either.

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 even know how to use that! I assume it’s not something you just
enable on any program. I’ve never seen programs adopt it.

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.
>

Swift has a ton of features that Pascal doesn’t have which the kind UI apps
which Apple supports. We could spend hours going over everything but I’m
just saying a new programmer would look at Swift vs Pascal and choose Swift.

The bigger problem is of course support for Apples frameworks. Once the
platform chooses a language like Apple does it kind of kills everything
else. Even popular languages like C# don’t compete so I don’t expect Pascal
to come out ahead her either.


> 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.
>
Sorry to be negative I’m just sounding the alarm. I’ve watched the
community dwindle over the years and people move on and new programmers
adopt new languages. It’s clearly going in the wrong direction as noted by
the original post. Am I wrong?

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?
>
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