Recent

Author Topic: Do newbies get a good "1st time impression" of Lazarus ?  (Read 39056 times)

avra

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 2514
    • Additional info
Re: Do newbies get a good "1st time impression" of Lazarus ?
« Reply #60 on: October 18, 2017, 10:17:30 am »
more often than not, I got error with fpcupdeluxe
if you use all buttons available , most of them will produce huge FAIL !
So you expect to use trunk versions of dozens of components with all possible combinations of FPC/LAZ (old, stable, fixes, trunk...) and you expect everything to work out of the box? No breakages, no incompabilities, no compilation issues? For such expectations one should stick to stable or fixes branch and without 3rd party components.

I would prefer to see fpcupdeluxe being capable to finish installation even when some component is not able to compile, but unfortunatelly that is not the case. I look at it as a place for future improvement, rather then a place for rant.
ct2laz - Conversion between Lazarus and CodeTyphon
bithelpers - Bit manipulation for standard types
pasettimino - Siemens S7 PLC lib

Thaddy

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 14166
  • Probably until I exterminate Putin.
Re: Do newbies get a good "1st time impression" of Lazarus ?
« Reply #61 on: October 18, 2017, 10:25:05 am »
Agree.
Specialize a type, not a var.

bee

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 393
Re: Do newbies get a good "1st time impression" of Lazarus ?
« Reply #62 on: October 18, 2017, 10:55:22 am »
Yup. Because I think he's just a troll spreading FUD and can't stop whining for nothing. I don't know what he's looking for and what he's about to make using FPC and Lazarus. If it's so hard, why doesn't he just use something else?
-Bee-

A long time pascal lover.

fred

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 201
Re: Do newbies get a good "1st time impression" of Lazarus ?
« Reply #63 on: October 18, 2017, 11:33:00 am »
If I would not like it I would not use it.
So far i'm quite happy with Lazarus  :-X

mai

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 133
  • truther
Re: Do newbies get a good "1st time impression" of Lazarus ?
« Reply #64 on: October 18, 2017, 12:01:41 pm »
I installed ~ 30 times now and f.deluxe is my favourite.

more breakage with the other methods, e.g. Ubuntu packaging seems broken.

avra

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 2514
    • Additional info
Re: Do newbies get a good "1st time impression" of Lazarus ?
« Reply #65 on: October 18, 2017, 12:03:01 pm »
Forget about F1.
I do not agree with this. I first try F1, then wiki is usually the second, google third, and source browsing last. Although sometimes source can be second or even first. ;-)
Therefore among the first things I do after installation is to setup F1 with CHM help files. I also wish it worked out of the box like that, but that is not the case yet. Another room for improvement. Everybody is welcome to enter it.

And yes, I understand that making (or worse - failing) F1 to work can bother newbie a lot. Maybe even more then docking not beeing default.
ct2laz - Conversion between Lazarus and CodeTyphon
bithelpers - Bit manipulation for standard types
pasettimino - Siemens S7 PLC lib

wp

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 11830
Re: Do newbies get a good "1st time impression" of Lazarus ?
« Reply #66 on: October 18, 2017, 01:02:25 pm »
I mainly work on Windows, something like 90% or more. Here installing a functional online-help is no problem at all - just check it in the installer, and it works out of the box, confirmed with the recently published Lazarus 1.8RC5. 

I'm not saying it is good, though, and I only rarely use F1 because the online help for most topics is non-existent or or trivial (i.e. making obvious statements). Source browsing, on the other hand, is extremely fast, must faster than lhelp to open even if it finds a help item. If I need additional information I use internet search, forum search, wiki (in this order, given by the power of the search tools).

JuhaManninen

  • Global Moderator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 4458
  • I like bugs.
Re: Do newbies get a good "1st time impression" of Lazarus ?
« Reply #67 on: October 18, 2017, 01:45:40 pm »
A couple of months ago I tried openSUSE Tumbleweed for exactly this reason. It is the most up-to-date rolling release distro and in fact it worked quite well and pretty stable. Unfortunately, the package maintainers don't seem too eager to update Lazarus still being at version 1.6.2. But if one wants to compile the latest Lazarus and FPC, openSUSE Tumbleweed may be a better choice, but I have no experience there.
I must comment on this one.
How could openSUSE Tumbleweed be the most up-to-date rolling distro if it doesn't have even recent versions of FPC and Lazarus?
Manjaro, also a rolling distro, has the latest of them always. I don't know who maintans all their packages but it is an impressive collection.
I believe Arch is very good, too, but I was lazy to learn its installation.

I had openSUSE Tumbleweed in a travelling laptop ~2 years ago. I noticed its package selection is very limited and outdated. The emphasis clearly is to test the distro development itself, not the applications a user may need. I guess for that reason it has logging or debug info or something enabled which slows down its startup a lot. Starting it took many times longer than good distros do. The actual OpenSuse releases start faster.
Thus, I would not recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed for anybody, except for OpenSuse distro developers.
Mostly Lazarus trunk and FPC 3.2 on Manjaro Linux 64-bit.

mai

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 133
  • truther
Re: Do newbies get a good "1st time impression" of Lazarus ?
« Reply #68 on: October 18, 2017, 04:33:45 pm »
I run LAz 1.9 with fp 3.1.1 ... quite workable - once you made sure you have max. 1 compiler in $PATH - in KDE neon rolling. has latest KDE which is nicely stable.

munair

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 798
  • compiler developer @SharpBASIC
    • SharpBASIC
Re: Do newbies get a good "1st time impression" of Lazarus ?
« Reply #69 on: October 18, 2017, 04:34:24 pm »
A couple of months ago I tried openSUSE Tumbleweed for exactly this reason. It is the most up-to-date rolling release distro and in fact it worked quite well and pretty stable. Unfortunately, the package maintainers don't seem too eager to update Lazarus still being at version 1.6.2. But if one wants to compile the latest Lazarus and FPC, openSUSE Tumbleweed may be a better choice, but I have no experience there.
I must comment on this one.
How could openSUSE Tumbleweed be the most up-to-date rolling distro if it doesn't have even recent versions of FPC and Lazarus?
Manjaro, also a rolling distro, has the latest of them always. I don't know who maintans all their packages but it is an impressive collection.
I believe Arch is very good, too, but I was lazy to learn its installation.

I had openSUSE Tumbleweed in a travelling laptop ~2 years ago. I noticed its package selection is very limited and outdated. The emphasis clearly is to test the distro development itself, not the applications a user may need. I guess for that reason it has logging or debug info or something enabled which slows down its startup a lot. Starting it took many times longer than good distros do. The actual OpenSuse releases start faster.
Thus, I would not recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed for anybody, except for OpenSuse distro developers.
Packagers make decisions. If you do a comparison, you will find that openSUSE Tumbleweed is one of the most if not THE most up-to-date distro. This certainly applies to the Linux kernel and the desktop. It is closely followed by Fedora. But not all available Linux software can be packaged every week.

Early on Tumbleweed wasn't as stable, but this has changed. You can read the many reviews on the internet. Now, this doesn't mean that I would recommend Tumbleweed or openSUSE in general. It has issues, especially with multimedia like playing Youtube. But I still have it running on a spare computer for several months now and it is pretty stable. I actually developed part of my software here very comfortably.

If I were to recommend a stable programming environment, it would be Debian.
keep it simple

Trenatos

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 533
    • MarcusFernstrom.com
Re: Do newbies get a good "1st time impression" of Lazarus ?
« Reply #70 on: October 18, 2017, 04:41:11 pm »
My first few impressions of Lazarus were not that great.

Examples of things that didn't make sense:

There are options in the Project settings to compiler for various systems, it LOOKS like all you have to do is select one and go, but of course that's not true.

When setting up database connections, it LOOKS like all you have to do is select the database type and off you go, but of course that's not true.

Trying to look up how to do things can be a nightmare, tons of outdated information and "Just go RTFM" which doesn't help someone new to the language or tools.

I knew it had the potential, and I kept with it, but I don't think it's a great first impression if you're new, too many things are assumed that you know.

Another frustration is making CLI programs, why can't I drag and drop a gui component onto my editor and at least get the uses and defaults setup?
It can be a pain to find out how to programmatically use something that normally is drag'n'drop (Right click on them, 'show meta info' would be super useful)

Debugger not working with OSX/MacOS.

No easy way to output text (writeln) to the debugger or somewhere when making GUI apps.

Random things I remember from when I started out. I'm not surprised people give it a go and then give up when they try to do anything more complex than a button that pops up a message, I didn't give up because I'm obsessive and KNEW it could perform if I learn how to use it.

BeniBela

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 905
    • homepage
Re: Do newbies get a good "1st time impression" of Lazarus ?
« Reply #71 on: October 18, 2017, 11:22:38 pm »

Packagers make decisions. If you do a comparison, you will find that openSUSE Tumbleweed is one of the most if not THE most up-to-date distro. This certainly applies to the Linux kernel and the desktop. It is closely followed by Fedora. But not all available Linux software can be packaged every week.

Early on Tumbleweed wasn't as stable, but this has changed. You can read the many reviews on the internet. Now, this doesn't mean that I would recommend Tumbleweed or openSUSE in general. It has issues, especially with multimedia like playing Youtube. But I still have it running on a spare computer for several months now and it is pretty stable. I actually developed part of my software here very comfortably.




I got openSUSE Tumbleweed from work.

It installs 1000 updates every week! If that is not up-to-date, what could be?

No exaggeration.  I ran the updater on Monday and thought it showed "all updates completed" , but now I wonder, if I forget to click a final "install update", because today it wants to install 2710 new updates. It is ridiculous


mai

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 133
  • truther
Re: Do newbies get a good "1st time impression" of Lazarus ?
« Reply #72 on: October 19, 2017, 12:15:27 am »
My first few impressions of Lazarus were not that great.

Same here! By this time I have documented   what will have haunted quite a number of users of debian derivates (Mint, Ubu, ...) and is a real showstopper. Immediately after installing a secondary checkout, say "trunk", a recurring "unit not found" will ruin the whole experience right then and there.

Now, once you are aware of this it is trivial to remedy but it really should not happen in the first place. Once fixed, one can do quite a bit before any further obstacles of that calibre might appear.
 

bee

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 393
Re: Do newbies get a good "1st time impression" of Lazarus ?
« Reply #73 on: October 19, 2017, 06:11:37 am »
By this time I have documented what will have haunted quite a number of users of debian derivates (Mint, Ubu, ...) and is a real showstopper. Immediately after installing a secondary checkout, say "trunk", a recurring "unit not found" will ruin the whole experience right then and there.
Great job! Thank you. :)

However, there are some obvious mistakes that shouldn't happen if you know the language syntaxes/rules and read some installation instructions before doing it. For example:

- You named one of your units like one of the FPC units.
Of course. You're also not allowed to name a unit using Pascal keywords and reserved words. Isn't it obvious?

- Forgot to add a package dependency.
Sure. Perhaps you also forget to download the installer? *kidding :D I mean, it's clearly not FPC/Laz's fault. You can't blame someone else for your own mistakes, right?

Nevertheless the page does contain many useful informations for people who just directly install FPC/Laz without properly reading the instruction manuals in advance. Well, of course I ever have had such one-or-two stupid mistake, but I know it's my fault and I should be able to fix it myself by reading some instructions and also use some proper tools and logics as well.

I think I now understand why you seems so angry and mad about this whole thing. :)
-Bee-

A long time pascal lover.

JuhaManninen

  • Global Moderator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 4458
  • I like bugs.
Re: Do newbies get a good "1st time impression" of Lazarus ?
« Reply #74 on: October 19, 2017, 08:50:39 am »
Immediately after installing a secondary checkout, say "trunk", a recurring "unit not found" will ruin the whole experience right then and there.
Secondary checkout of what? FPC or Lazarus?
Many simultaneous Lazarus checkouts are OK when you keep them in separate directories, and maybe use --pcp= config path as needed.
Many FPC versions in your $PATH however break things for sure. Why would you do such thing? It is obviously a bad idea. Was it the fundamental reason for your problems?

The wiki page you updated should be very accurate. Please make sure the advice given is correct.
Mostly Lazarus trunk and FPC 3.2 on Manjaro Linux 64-bit.

 

TinyPortal © 2005-2018