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).