Who are the Pascal lovers ?

[Bogen85]

It's difficult to figure out what is needed to make Pascal a more popular language but, it's unlikely the list would include putting down programmers that use/prefer other languages.

Definitely agreed. Programmers have a range of needs regarding their language choices and are not always able to only use one programming language.

[Dzandaa]

hi,

"hi friend", I agree with you.

We are in an era of financial computing, not an era of productive computing.

In the beginning, the P*thon language served as a communication interface
between programs and now, it serves as an interface between blackboxes
mostly written in C or C++, what an evolution!!!

B->

[alpine]

Funny thing is how 40 years ago the Pascal was in vogue and now we mourn that other languages are .

[PierceNg]

I visit beginend.net and Delphi Praxis forum every now and then. I was just trawling Github for Delphi projects, and looks like there are many current ones, although of course nothing to compare with the numbers for Javascript, Python, Go, etc. To me Delphi is alive and still has legs, grumblings that the vendor's licensing games will kill its user base notwithstanding.

I suppose all Delphi programmers are also Pascal programmers by definition, but not sure whether that is much help to Free Pascal / Lazarus.

Previously I was using Smalltalk, The Smalltalk world has 3 major commercial vendors and 3 major open source implementations. Fragmentation in Smalltalk world is even worse than for Pascal.

[Joanna]

It's difficult to figure out what is needed to make Pascal a more popular language but, it's unlikely the list would include putting down programmers that use/prefer other languages.

I’ve given up on trying to win over people who don’t want to do Pascal. What do we need them for ?? They are irrelevant. I don’t need their approval or validation. We should proceed without them and leave them behind.  It’s a waste of energy which is better spent improving Pascal. I’m not ashamed to admit that pascal is the only language I want to use.
I will not disparage people who prefer to use other languages however I will not tolerate any abuse from them either. Just because I’ve chosen to use a not very popular language does not make me a pushover nobody should ever feel ashamed or embarrassed for using pascal.

[440bx]

I’ve given up on trying to win over people who don’t want to do Pascal. What do we need them for ?? They are irrelevant.

People "who don't want to do Pascal" are irrelevant ??... if that were true, the choice of O/Ss and other very useful programs would be rather limited.

I don’t need their approval or validation.

That's perfectly fine and, it looks like they don't need yours either (which is a good thing too.)

We should proceed without them and leave them behind. 

"without them" it's quite possible that neither FPC nor Lazarus would have been possible (there is plenty of supporting C code that is directly or indirectly from GNU in the project.)  Careful too, who's behind and who's ahead depends on the frame of reference. 

I will not disparage people who prefer to use other languages

of course you wouldn't, those people are just "irrelevant".  It would be a waste of time to disparage irrelevant people.

however I will not tolerate any abuse from them either.

They probably won't either which, after reading a couple of the recent posts in this thread, gives them good reason to look elsewhere if they want to be considered relevant.

[Joanna]

I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say completely.
I wasn’t referring to people who write operating systems although I wish an operating system could be written in pascal

[loaded]

I’ve given up on trying to win over people who don’t want to do Pascal.

Maybe they, too, have given up on you!!! (Even if they give up, we won't give up on you  ) It's not worth worrying about Pascal so much!
Pascal will find his way to flow, just as water finds its way.
According to me ;
Pascal or others!
This is a choice that cannot be described as wrong or right. You should use whatever works for you, such as a honey bee collecting different nectar from different flowers.

[Joanna]

The strange thing about people who don’t use pascal is they always pretend that they know pascal and have been using it for a long time. I don’t understand why they do this? Then I try to start a Beginner level conversation about pascal which always ends badly. I give them a link to a good online book but they are unappreciative 

In my experience real programmers always enjoy programming questions and will try to solve them.

[winni]

... although I wish an operating system could be written in pascal

Hi!

Have a look at

https://wiki.freepascal.org/Operating_Systems_written_in_FPC


Winni

[Thaddy]

Yes, @Joanna, many.... That list is not even complete.

[Joanna]

Have any of you used the pascal os with fpc? or for other things?

I’ve heard that the original Mac OS was written in pascal but why is it not still written in pascal? It’s back to the same issue of pascal was popular and then it wasn’t used anymore. Fpc is probably a lot better than the pascal used for original Mac OS.

[marcov]

I talked to university lectures a good decade ago (I helped with preparing a student laptop image with Lazarus each year). The tradeoffs of education are complicated , there are multiple drivers here:

• First, you choose a whole platform (IDE+language+libraries) not just a language
• There is always pressure to use "industry languages". Basically this is by the industry to save on training costs/time when hiring graduates out of school in large sweatshops. Of course half of the time the popularity of a language has already petered out by then (where is Perl nowadays?). Or moved to different frameworks etc (Rails).
• Pressure to use a certain language for marketing purposes. Usually for some sexy reason (e.g functional) or to align with some goal the education advertises with (e.g. "become a webdeveloper"). Students pick up on this and also only want to do what they consider sexy and are not always rational about that.
• Pressure to use a language for educational reasons, e.g.
  
  • because the environment is easy, stable and doesn't have too many features to distract. (for first language)
  • For the first language you also want minimal boiler plate to explain for the first programs. (Turbo) Pascal (begin end.) did/does very well there.
    
  • if you have a bit more HQ students (e.g. accelerated CS masters), you might want to encourage them to tinker and explore.
  • To give a taste of a different paradigm (e.g. Functional, usually not as first  language)
  • Students must be able to install it on their own computers. This precludes paid for languages without far reaching site licenses. Specially for smaller institutions this can be a problem
• You can't switch languages and their environments every year, because developing courses and iterating them also costs time.  Often the initial cohorts have a sub par experience (The course is too easy or difficult for the students, resulting in ad-hoc improvising).  This also has consequences for the previous points
  • the used "Industry languages" are more often than not yesterday's
  • sometimes teachers cling to an old language under educational pretences because they can teach it routinely, and making new coursework is an additional burden.

Many students stuck with Turbo Pascal for a long time because of the simple IDE (no designer to distract) and low boiler plate. Pascal is also easy and a good step up for more complicated languages with manual management (C,C++).

However industry and student pressure and the decrease familiarity with the console programming metaphor in the incoming students urged most to go with Java.

How to get Pascal back in the curriculum

Two points:

• Get a gigonormous multi billion company to sponsor and advocate it and make it sexy for at least half a decade Forget about doing it on a dime.
• Work on educational lazarus versions (e.g. allowing the teacher to hide the designer for the initial course, make it easy to configure and choose certain templates etc) and simply make the most of the people you CAN get and don't worry so much about the ones you can't anyway

[Joanna]

I haven’t tried it but in Lazarus if you make a simple console program do all the palettes with the gui controls still show? Even if they cannot be used?

Lazarus ide is rather complicated and worthy of an entire class in itself.
Why not teach it like Visual Basic was taught learning to operate the gui componets at same time as learning pascal?  Learning gui event programming is a valuable skill as well.
 When I took Visual Basic the teacher said that playing with gui controls is fun and motivates people to learn.

I’ve never tried plain fpc. Is it more like turbo pascal was? Maybe schools could use that to teach pascal language without distraction.

[marcov]

I haven’t tried it but in Lazarus if you make a simple console program do all the palettes with the gui controls still show? Even if they cannot be used?

Yes.

I don’t see any need to get rid of gui parts of Lazarus.

Not in all of lazarus. Just as a build/install option to do initial courses in some educational edition.

Why not teach it like Visual Basic was taught learning to operate the gui componets at same time as learning pascal?

Why no also throw quantum computing and neural networks into the mix? 

Seriously, the initial course must be as simple and overviewable as possible.  See also the remarks about boilerplate in the other message.

Even a certain percentage of CS masters never programmed before, and first need to get the basic idea. Often with the cooking recipe analogue (stir, check if done, if not goto stir) etc etc. Bits and pieces.

  Learning gui event programming is a valuable skill as well.

Less so than two decades ago. Most will never do anything but web and serverside development.

But even if it were, you need to phase it, and not throw everything and the kitchen sink at them in the first week.

I’ve never tried plain fpc. Is it more like turbo pascal was?

Yes. But as said, teaching students to operate console applications like the textmode IDE, and console apps in general is also lost time.  And quite often you only have 15-25 hours for the whole course.

Probably some limited framework to have some input and output in some GUI app is easier. But it is even easier to do that with precooked templates, with "// insert code here" comments.

Anyway the point is to listen to the needs of actual teachers.