Things that cross my mind and i am going to be brutally honest about this.
Media:* Naming: Lets be honest, Pascal instantly brings back ( found ) memories of the old programmers but it does not help when topics about Lazarus, FreePascal, Delphi come up in discussions and it instantly turns into "that old language", "nobody uses it", ...
* Dead feeling: Again its about perception. Coming back to Pascal community after 15 years, it feels like there is totally no interest into publicity at all.
Lets look at the freepascal website
February 15th, 2017: FPC version 3.0.2 has been released!
November 25th, 2015: FPC version 3.0.0 has been released!
O yea, now that really gives people confidence that a project is not dead and is pure in maintenance mode. /sarcasm...
* Blog posting? Almost none existing... Its rare to find people blog about why they use FreePascal / Delphi / Lazarus.
* Social Media? Redit / news.ycombinator ... the presence is almost none existing.
r/programming: ... I count something in the order off 11 articles / posts regarding pascal in the last 12 month
r/freepascal ... Graveyard.
r/delphi ... some life but not what you expect for a langue of this size.
lazarus-ide.org has news but it links to forum entries. And it seems it gets very little focus on publication.
* Documentation: Mix between outdated because one keeps finding 10 to 20 year old stuff. And no offense but the:
https://www.freepascal.org/docs.varIf this is anybody there idea of user friendly, modern ... Hello, 1980 wants there html layout back. Color syntax? Code examples ( some do have example but lots do not. And some are so old that they do not work. Seen that with a few )? If i am honest, it does not fill me with confidence.
* Weekly newsletters? Again, no idea if they even exist. What do people even search for?? Pascal, freepascal, delphi, lazarus ... TOOOOO MANY NAMES ... To give you a idea, weekly newsletter delphi = see one that ended in 2007. That again gives the dead feeling.
Codebase:Location: This is a point that also surprised me. There is no official github for freepascal. I know its at that other place ... even forgot the name, so irrelevant is has become. It feels so old when its not on github ( again my feeling but fairly sure that its also a factor that influences other people )
Bug reporting: Same issue. I HATE languages where they have separated non github bugtracking. I am lazy like a lot of people. If i need to make a account to report a bug on some obscure platform, its already half my interest gone. Yes, that is me but a lot of people are lazy. You lose a lot of people simply because your not using github. Project need to be able to move with the times. Yes, yes, you have valid reason to stay with the other one ( some technical, some simply because some people do not want to modernize / change / move = viewed as stuck in the past ).
Months ago ( one of the reason why i stopped with FreePascal ), i ran into a bug on a Raspberry Pi with Arm compilation. Has that bug been reported? No ... simply because its too much a hassle to figure out where to report, account stuff, ...
Did i mention lazy ( just kidding ) but the real more important factor => The lack of official releases with almost 1 to 2 years in between means a bug that i report, can take years to get fixed into a official build!!!!! And that is NONE ACCEPTABLE!! Sorry for caps but its true. Most people do not want to download and self compile if they can avoid it.
Compiler:What about more modern compilation outputs. C / C++ have Wasm output. This is the future for web development ( imho ). Even C# with there CoreRT will have wasm. Rust ... has experimental support. Even Nim is talking about it. But pascal, what is almost designed for wasm thanks to the non-gc need?
You want young fresh motivated volunteers to help with that? Well, let us bring up the whole github again...Yea, fat chance that a lot of people are going to help out on anything not git/github hosted. It sounds cruel but that is the world we live in. People need a taste of the good stuff before they get addicted and with so many bridges in the way, it simply demotivates people before they even start.
What i am trying to say is that Pascal is stuck in the past, living too much on its old glory and not moving forwards.
Conclusion:I can go on for a long time but there is a clear lack of effort. It feels more like everything Pascal related is moving at a snails speed. The people in charge are content and maybe not media aware and hey ... why do we need fancy documentation. Why do we need to publish new features or expected features. Lets release compiler updates every century...
How many people here know about the wonderful OmniPascal plugin for Visual Studio Code? I needed to stumble upon it by accident only to discover there is no publication ( even ended up publishing it around a few times for attention ).
A book can be written about how not to publish a language and the current freepascal / lazarus will be in the top 10. One can blame Borland for the drop in popularity, the moving of the main designer to microsoft but the last 10+ years, sorry but that is mostly homegrown.
As i stated, this is a pure out of my hart comment. I loved pascal in the past and still find it useful today BUT the resources are scattered everywhere, a lot is outdated and difficult to search for with google because of the different naming and overlap, everything feels like its stuck in the 1980s.
The best example of the 1980s stuck is the whole "begin end", what is a joke that shows up every time i published something pascal related. Nobody gives Ruby a hard time with there "end" only but i agree that seeing begin end in some deep loops, can look old fashion.
What freepacal needs in my opinion but will never happen. It is a makeover ... some small syntax changes to modernize, a name that is not associated with constant "old" pascal, a dedicated team that runs a central website where the compiler, lazarus run a combined media portal. Where you have weekly newsletters, updates, twitter and facebook postings, reddit/ynews postings, ... Something to centralize more. And i do not mean the current dedicated lazarus and freepascal websites.
A media offensive where you have people not only post here in this forum but also go out and say: Hey, sure, your language can do x in y seconds. Did you know that freexxxx can do it in y/2 seconds with less memory usage.
Its beyond a few simply fixes if the goal is to make people notice / revival pascal again.