Who are the Pascal lovers ?

[440bx]

OK, I am willing to take one for the team here !

If you have a way to wind my age back to 30 I'll do it, let me know what I need to do.....

Davo

I think we'd all be willing to take one for the team that way and, if I knew what you need to do to wind your age back to 30, I'd be the first one doing it 

[lainz]

I know here in Argentina Pascal is still at universities. But someone in Facebook asked me for help with pascal. Then I said please register in this forum and I didn't get further responses.

Yes forums are old school for young people. I think they use Facebook Messenger or Discord nowadays until something more cool replaces it. But not forums never more.

[Handoko]

I think we should be able to guess, even without this pool, not much new programmers especially teens and fresh graduated ones are interested to learn Pascal. You know the reasons. The downfall of Delphi, big companies keep pushing new languages, the raise of mobile/web programming.

The result of the pool isn't surprising to me. But I'm more interested in what can we do to gain new users, any suggestions? I'm a bit busy in the end of this year but I'm sure I will have more time to support Lazarus/Pascal community later.

I am a hobbyist programmer without any formal programming training. I started learn programming when I was 13 in 1993. I stopped doing any programming from 2000 to 2016 because I was busy pursuing my career in graphics design.

[loaded]

For now, there are 3 pascal lovers in our family.
9-15-41 (By the way, my 15-year-old son also participated in the survey.)

Advantage ;
When they come to me to ask questions, we share our experiences with tea in a family atmosphere. It has a very positive social impact.

Disadvantage ;
You are constantly being asked why, how and why. Here, too, I use the Forum as an escape ramp.

My thoughts;
Young people need advice. Indeed, youth heeds the emotions rather than reason, and emotions and desires are blind; they do not consider the consequences

[Dzandaa]

Hi everyone
I am in one of the oldest categories, 67 years old.
I am retired and a former programmer-analyst at a University.

I was first a Scientific Programmer in Laser Spectroscopy and then I was in a team in charge of computer security, Web and help to Scientists.
I knew a lot of computer language starting with the assembler (Z80, 8086, 6502, 6800, 68000, etc ...)
The Basic, Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, C#, php, SQL, Forth, Reduce, Arduino, Wemos, etc...

As a retiree, I have more time and I discovered by chance, a year ago, the Pascal Lazarus.
What luck!!!
Finally a free language that allowed you to write programs compatible with
Windows, Mac and Linux and with a graphical interface and a GUI worthy of Microsoft's Visual Studio.
And above all, a very responsive forum.
Keep it known, it's worth it.

B->

[440bx]

Yes forums are old school for young people. I think they use Facebook Messenger or Discord nowadays until something more cool replaces it.

My theory about that is that young people have gotten used to instant attention and to a great extent instant gratification (or as close to instant as possible.)

But I'm more interested in what can we do to gain new users, any suggestions?

I've asked and keep asking myself that question.  Of course, there are no easy answers.  One or two features isn't enough to attract new users.  One of the best features of Pascal, which keeps me in the Pascal camp, is compilation speed, I suspect I'm not the only one that appreciates compiling tens of thousands of lines of code in a few tenth of a second.  That speed changes the way one develops a program (in a significantly better way.) 

That probably explains why some of the most popular languages today are either interpreters or close to interpreters.

Enhancements to the language that allows a programmer to write simpler and easier to understand code would definitely be most welcome but, it looks like that ship sunk a decade or two ago.

Programming is a bit like cooking.  You got to have the right materials which implies the ability to select them and the ability to mix them to get, what is hopefully, the best possible result.  (For the record, I'm a lousy cook  )

Disadvantage ;
You are constantly being asked why, how and why. Here, too, I use the Forum as an escape ramp.

But that is also a great advantage.  I don't remember his exact words but, Einstein explained that he figured out special relativity because he asked himself a question a kid would ask himself and, as an adult, didn't stop until he got the answer.

Every now and then, kids ask some really good questions that are worth finding the answer to.

[dbannon]

..... But I'm more interested in what can we do to gain new users, any suggestions? ...

I thought it would be a help to just get the name out there - so, in my recent release of tomboy-ng, six days ago, I included the pretty big "Powered By" logo. I have already had two complaints about "advertising". Sigh...

I must admit, that particular logo is quite big, I tried to scale it down but the "Free Pascal" and "Project" became too small to read. If someone still has the artwork (ie svg file) it could be altered. I still think labeling our products as being "A Free Pascal Lazarus Project" is a good idea !

Davo

[Bogen85]

I've asked and keep asking myself that question.  Of course, there are no easy answers.  One or two features isn't enough to attract new users.  One of the best features of Pascal, which keeps me in the Pascal camp, is compilation speed, I suspect I'm not the only one that appreciates compiling tens of thousands of lines of code in a few tenth of a second.  That speed changes the way one develops a program (in a significantly better way.) 

I fit into that category. The EDIT/RUN cycle (versus an EDIT/BUILD/RUN cycle) makes for fast rapid development and closing the loop fast on issues.

Yes, Free Pascal has the BUILD step, but is almost negligible time wise, it almost just feels like a cursory syntax check found in popular dynamically typed interpreted languages, but obviously much more thorough.

That probably explains why some of the most popular languages today are either interpreters or close to interpreters.

Yes... However, most (if not all, at least of the most popular ones) are dynamically typed. And for production code that can be problematic. So by the time you throw in decent static analysis, your BUILD times then often surpass that of the slowest statically typed compiled languages.

So for me, Free Pascal wins over those languages.

I think we should be able to guess, even without this pool, not much new programmers especially teens and fresh graduated ones are interested to learn Pascal. You know the reasons. The downfall of Delphi, big companies keep pushing new languages, the raise of mobile/web programming.

I'm not much into mobile programming.... But would like to be, but to me the most popular tool-kits are not languages/environments I'm comfortable in for various reasons.

If Lazarus could reliably target HTML5-DOM/CSS/WASM the same way it targets all it's other back-ends (GTK/QT/Cocoa/Win32/etc...) then it be in a better position to attract a lot more new and younger programmers.

I fall into the median category, 50-59 years old.

Pascal was the third high level language I learned the mid 80s (BASIC, C, then Pascal).
(Ok, I did learn Logo after BASIC, but I did not do any practical in it).
Used Pascal at work and college late 80s, early 90s, then mostly C, then Pascal again mid/late 90s in University.

Build times the #1 outstanding feature. Always... From Turbo Pascal through Delphi...

Post 2000 did not really use Pascal much until about 2 and a half years ago. I'd looked at Free Pascal some prior to 2010 but was too focused on other languages to give it much attention.

Used a lot of other languages at workplaces and for hobby stuff since 2000. (Forth, Various Assembly Languages, C, C++, Ruby, Lua, Python, Ada, to name a few...)

Coming back to Pascal was and is refreshing.

For me it is a very competitive viable alternative to current popular systems programming languages (C/C++/Rust/Go). (Yes, there are others, Ada, Swift, Objective C, no need to list every one...).

Many of the features of Object/Free Pascal that makes one prefer it over other modern alternatives could be considered subjective.

I don't consider BUILD times to be subjective... (or ease of project setup).

[Dzandaa]

Hello again,
I agree with 440Bx that young people want "things" that work right away.

But the compilation time in Lazarus is not really a problem.

I spent last Sunday afternoon helping a student of my wife on a Python language problem (fashionable for the moment )

Finding the right libraries (they often change syntax) debugging a CNN program takes time and especially a lot of "print".

The Lazarus has several advantages:
Once compiled, just copy the executable on another machine
and it works, no need to reinstall libraries, etc...
you can also easily recompile it for another OS.
Code completion is a must, multitasking is easy
and in addition the debugger is very efficient which saves a lot of time.

I was a C# programmer and I found Lazarus, by hazard, trying to find a way to run my graphical programs in Linux.

Now, I have translated most of my C# programs in Lazarus!!!.

What can scare young people it's the number of Windows, menu and buttons of Lazarus 

B->

[alpine]

What can scare young people it's the number of Windows, menu and buttons of Lazarus 

I've tried to introduce Lazarus to my 16yo son and he was utterly confused from the abundance of detached windows and amount of properties. Unfortunately educationlaz package doesn't work any more.

[Thaddy]

I've tried to introduce Lazarus to my 16yo son and he was utterly confused from the abundance of detached windows and amount of properties. Unfortunately educationlaz package doesn't work any more.

Introduce him using a Laz version with docked installed. That is not cluttered.

[BSaidus]

I think a serie of small step by step tutorials will help people understand and take way with lazarus.
     1. getting lazarus/fpc ( installing )
     2. explain the philosophie of lazarus/fpc.
     3. basic examples from 0 to advencd.

     

[lainz]

Today I searched for how to edit excel with android, and I get at least 4 youtube videos with tutorial about it. How many videos are for lazarus?

[alpine]

I've tried to introduce Lazarus to my 16yo son and he was utterly confused from the abundance of detached windows and amount of properties. Unfortunately educationlaz package doesn't work any more.

Introduce him using a Laz version with docked installed. That is not cluttered.

I did. It helped a bit but not much. BTW the docked form editor works in recent versions (still have some issues though), where the educationlaz doesn't. IMHO it will be worth the effort to fix it.

[wp]

Today I searched for how to edit excel with android, and I get at least 4 youtube videos with tutorial about it. How many videos are for lazarus?

Just a few picked from the top of my search window
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jJ1FNfLwuU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VPvQ_dXMhw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1YOaMQHMUI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wA3p2JqmvI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW2s1IaiL_s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcE0Zelr8r0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk3xjW4G-kw