Dear forum members.
I like Lazarus and FPC very much. But now I see that both are not very popular among my friend/collegues/other people around me. As myself I use it for the research (I'm a PhD student) and very rare on the job (our department, about 30 people, uses Java+Eclipse for development) as a replacement for complicated bash scripts (I know bash scripting, but not very well).
So I see that it's not very popular and want to ask how you see the future of FPC+Lazarus? Which role should it play? Language for serious business projects? Language for researchers and students? Or just a language to support old Delphi projects? Anything else?
If I compare FPC+Lazarus with Java+Eclipse for corporate use, i see that Java+Eclipse have:
- Continuous integration systems (Jenkins, Hudson)
- SVN/CVS integration (Team SVN provider)
- dependency management (Maven)
- Javadoc and help system
- a lot of libraries, e.g. for Web (e.g., SOAP, for Lazarus I know about wsdl toolkit 0.5, but it never worked for me)
- Web application servers (e.g., Tomcat)
...
All this staff is very important for business projects, so of course Java+Eclipse is a very popular solution and it's very complicated for FPC+Lazarus to compete with them. Many corporations invest money in Java, Lazarus does not have such a financial sources. So it's OK. Sad but true:)
Then I try and remember that Pascal from the beginning was a language for learning/researching. So it should be nice for students. Indeed, in Russian universities it's still popular. For Europe I can't say so. And there is a global tendency in moving from Pascal to Java, C++, again, because they fit better business needs.
What else is important for students? Contests!
But if you see at Programming Enviroment at IBM ACM ICPC (the biggest team student contest in the world):
http://cm.baylor.edu/ICPCWiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Programming%20Environmenthttp://neerc.ifmo.ru/information/contest-rules.htmlThere is only Java and C++ available now:(
And I can remember that I participated in a quarter-final with Delphi in 2004 and 2005.
So Pascal was kicked out from a contest...
Thus, students also has no more motivation to learn Pascal - business needs Java/C, contests do not accept Pascal.
Maybe there is a way back to ACM and other contests?
What do you think about all these? How do You see the future of the project and target audience? Who will use Lazarus/ are using it now? For which developers it fits better than other languages?
Should Lazarus choose a target "audience" (business developers, students, researchers, web, databases, etc.) and plan roadmap to fit their needs? Or just continue as is?
Thank You in advance,
Kind Regards,
mvampire:)