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

[Guillermo Martínez Jiménez]

Prease DON'T add garbage collector.  IMO it isn't a good idea.  I had
very bad experiences with it. Unless somebody found a new magic
algorithm in the last decade...

El Wed, 16 Oct 2024 04:49:44 -0700
Hairy Pixels via fpc-pascal <fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org> escribió:
> 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?
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > fpc-pascal maillist  -
> > fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.orghttps://lists.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > fpc-pascal maillist  -  fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org
> > https://lists.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
> >