Delphi Community Edition vs Lazarus for Begginers

[WooBean]

...
Where are the brilliant scientists have gone?

Gone to flowers, every one?

[Thaddy]

I have never read Microsoft associated with Flowers..

[PascalDragon]

My rationale is, having read some versions releases logs of lazarus, that last releases have some bugs on the components that could discourage beginners or may get on the way of fast learning the basics, if so, there's a version that the community consider as "rock stable"?

As if Delphi would be bug free... 

[dbannon]

Gone to flowers, every one?

When will they ever learn ....

Seriously, when we say that the Delphi Community Edition is "free" we mean as in "free beer", it does not cost you money. But it does cost you in complexity and time meeting its licensing requirements. And worrying that those requirements may change in the future.

FPC/Lazarus is free as in beer but also as in speech. And thats far more important, you know you can use the copy you have now forever. Its very unlikely it will suddenly become a restricted product in some way. You can look through the source and say "wow, I can use that trick in my code" !

Software wants to be free !

Davo

[cpicanco]

A safe and fun environment for beginners is built by teachers. Of course, an IDE can help a lot with  this task for some problems. But not all of them. That said, In my experience (I feel myself as a happy user of Lazarus most of the time), the last stable version or the fixes branch was always the most fun and safe for me.

Free Pascal and Lazarus are truly community driven projects and there is a lot of excellent documentation out there. However, there is an intrinsic complexity that any beginner should be aware of when writing code with and for this environment: Code is written by people. People may disagree. Even alone, you may disagree with yourself. Branchs and alternatives may exist for common problems. And, for sure, bugs will happen and sometimes you will not find yourself in position to fix them. Beginners (specially them) may find themselves a lost, specially when writing alone and having just a single teacher to talk with. Specially without the money to buy support from Delphi. So, an important lesson is to learn how to communicate with the community, how to make friends, how to socialize, how to be excellent with each other. I am pretty sure this community have all of this and more to offer. But, as I said, an IDE (I mean, any IDE) may not be a safe and fun way to start.

[cpicanco]

Gone to flowers, every one?

When will they ever learn ....

Seriously, when we say that the Delphi Community Edition is "free" we mean as in "free beer", it does not cost you money. But it does cost you in complexity and time meeting its licensing requirements. And worrying that those requirements may change in the future.

FPC/Lazarus is free as in beer but also as in speech. And thats far more important, you know you can use the copy you have now forever. Its very unlikely it will suddenly become a restricted product in some way. You can look through the source and say "wow, I can use that trick in my code" !

Software wants to be free !

Davo

Free as in freedom, not as is free beer. There is no free lunch, no free beer. There is always someone paying for them.

[El Salvador]

Seriously, when we say that the Delphi Community Edition is "free" we mean as in "free beer", it does not cost you money. But it does cost you in complexity and time meeting its licensing requirements. And worrying that those requirements may change in the future.

Delphi CE collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Embarcadero. Your computer data, what components you are using, what projects you are compiling and etc...

And you can't opt out.

[Paolo]

@El Salvador,
+1
be aware of that

[Paolo]

.. and there was an old post of Marco Cantù said that they plan to no maintainig activation of old delphi version for people not anymore updating delphi. So you can have delphi 2006 , 2007, ... xe etc.. not activable ( delphi 7 was the latest one that can be activated locally)  someone here can confirm what I am saying ?
On the contrary laz/fpc is forever.

[paule32]

@cpicanco:

I agree with you and @El Salvador !

Delphi CE was built for, to catch new Clients for the Embercadero Pro License's.
You are free to download, install, and use it.
You get a one-Year License to the Product.
After this year, you have to un-Install all (with your installed Components), and re-Install it.
But this is a no-go.
Because you lose Time in it, by install all your new/old Things.
You can use the Delphi CE Version for commercial, too.
But the marge is only 5.000 Dollars for one year.

By the Pro-License's, you don't need to do all these Things.
And the profit marge is sky open...

But you never don't forget, that (if you use Delphi Product's or Lazarus) all profit marges have to be taxed !

And learn Pascal - either Standard or Object oriented - that is not a Lazarus or Delphi CE issue.
To learn Pascal, you don't need Lazarus or Delphi.
All what you need is "Turbo Pascal" or "fpc"

AND THE ONLY FACT ARE:

- get it, what you will be an Expert
- use it for fun, and enjoy
- learn it for fun, and enjoy

THAT IS ALL

The other things will be become later - Again: you don't need a GUI IDE.

[paule32]

@Paolo:

This is not a Question how to Activate the Software locally - This is always possible - for each Part/Port, it give a counter Part/Port (if it locally or remote - all things works nearly identically:
to see this: compare the following commands on you Console:

# ping localhost    <-- this is the same as: 127.0.0.1 (your current local nic)
# ping 127.0.0.1  <-- this is the same as: localhost   (your current local nic)
(or):
# ping 192.168.178.1  <-- this is for tiny local networks (home net)
# ping 10.10.10.10        <-- this is for big local networks

[cpicanco]

@cpicanco:

I agree with you and @El Salvador !

Delphi CE was built for, to catch new Clients for the Embercadero Pro License's.
You are free to download, install, and use it.
You get a one-Year License to the Product.
After this year, you have to un-Install all (with your installed Components), and re-Install it.
But this is a no-go.
Because you lose Time in it, by install all your new/old Things.
You can use the Delphi CE Version for commercial, too.
But the marge is only 5.000 Dollars for one year.

By the Pro-License's, you don't need to do all these Things.
And the profit marge is sky open...

But you never don't forget, that (if you use Delphi Product's or Lazarus) all profit marges have to be taxed !

And learn Pascal - either Standard or Object oriented - that is not a Lazarus or Delphi CE issue.
To learn Pascal, you don't need Lazarus or Delphi.
All what you need is "Turbo Pascal" or "fpc"

AND THE ONLY FACT ARE:

- get it, what you will be an Expert
- use it for fun, and enjoy
- learn it for fun, and enjoy

THAT IS ALL

The other things will be become later - Again: you don't need a GUI IDE.

I am afraid to disagree paule32. I need Lazarus, for sure. It is great for me.

[Paolo]

Maybe I am wrong, but once you install delphi, at first activation your are requested to validate on line the installation.

[domasz]

I have been using Delphi since version 3. Now I only use Delphi for some of the old projects. All new ones are Lazarus-only.

Problems with Delphi:
1) Since always it lacked new components, classes, functions. Lazarus has OPM. For example programmers were discussing some classes on forums and I didn't have them in my 2 years old Delphi.
2) Sometimes Pro versions were broken (for eg. 2005) and you have to get a new version every few years to have access to modern libraries and components
3) They broke compatibility with old code in new Delphis because of how they handle Unicode now.

[paule32]

I am afraid to disagree paule32. I need Lazarus, for sure. It is great for me.

Yes.
Nobody, or me said, that Lazarus is not a good Thing.
What I need/would to say was:
You need fun to enjoy learning, and programming DSL - The issue is not the DSL (Domain Syntax Language - the short name for "something" programming Language).
The issue is, that you don't have to the capitalism, and profit in mind nothing at all.