Can FPC/Lazarus save the World?

[MarkMLl]

The ones with low connectivity problems occurrence probably implement some on error mitigation and tune the timeouts. Some with more widespread usage go 3 Tier (happening since Delphi 6, posting the datasets as TClientDataSets, and not hard wiring grids to remote sets).

I think grids are a major problem, unless presented read-only to provide context for a current-row edit.

For national systems, the competition often favours sizable domestic partners, based on criteria that are often already old when applied. Besides government this often also includes privatised former national companies. (like railway water and energy sector). Even after privatisation, many connections still keep existing. It is not just the UK who has pain there.

I agree, and I'm not necessarily hostile to that. However I'd like to backtrack and highlight Thaddy's blaming of the Tories (the UK's right-wing party) for the PO debacle: historically, all major parties tried to favour ICL, with the Tories possibly less to blame since their approach (if given free reign) would have been to divest the state of all involvement and favour the market economy.

Yes. So government and big corporations are mostly out. Go for SMB.

Which Borland abandoned during the Helms era.

MarkMLl

[MarkMLl]

• their composition includes "peas and cabbage" mixed together,

But at least they don't split "Pascal" and "Delphi", as many "pundits" have.

MarkMLl

[MarkMLl]

• microcontroller programming (assembler, C),

You forgot Pascal there, it was once the most used language for micro-controllers.

Rubbish. Absolute and total tosh. Twaddle. Dare I say it... ox-droppings.

The traditional language for microcontrollers was assembler, and very /very/ slowly started moving towards C when the Intel 8051 replaced the 8048. Cooling taught a few generations of foreign students Modula-2, with even less impact than Ada in the field. The Arduino persuaded people to look at C++, provided that they didn't try using heap-based strings or OO techniques (which didn't stop them trying, there's no record of any deaths). The handful of proponents of Pascal on that class of hardware (and believe me, I most emphatically am /not/ attempting to belittle their contribution) are in this forum.

MarkMLl
[/list]

[LV]

Sorry, I'm not a political scientist. According to the TIOBE index, Object Pascal saves the world in 11th place. It's not bad?
https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

The problem is that the TIOBE list "sucks".

Pascal occupies a higher position in the "sucks" TIOBE index  (11th place) than PYPL (29th place), or IEEE Spectrum (45th place).

[MarkMLl]

Pascal occupies a higher position in the "sucks" TIOBE index  (11th place) than PYPL (29th place), or IEEE Spectrum (45th place).

Cruel :-)

Marginally worse than FORTRAN though :-/

Actually, I suspect that the "popularity" of FORTRAN is due to its having been used for a number of "must-have" libraries which have been encapsulated by Python and Electron and used in things like Inkscape plugins. The fact that lots of people find themselves trying to maintain FORTRAN code is not necessarily because they want to.

MarkMLl

[MarkMLl]

Another reason is the large number of "theorists", around '90, behind a language as Java: dozens of books on patterns, object oriented programming, UML, etc. Behind Pascal was a little group with Wirth and few others.

I agree with your point about Java, and Borland had their finger in that pie as well (although when one scratched the surface, a lot of Java's cross-platform stuff was an illusion unless one was in a position to write ones own JVM).

Actually, Borland had their finger in a lot of pies:

* Delphi

* C++

* Java

* Intrabuilder

...and that's leaving out things that they shed relatively early like Prolog.

What those have in common is that they used Borland's unparalleled (at least until Lazarus matured) integration of sourcecode, form designer and debugger. If I might highlight just one of those, Intrabuilder was very good indeed- Delphi technology applied to Javascript- but mandated a particular Borland backend as the server (just as Netscape Visual Javascript mandated a particular backend, and was locked down even further when Oracle grabbed it).

Which takes us back to one facet of the original question: what (if anything) does Oracle have as a development tool that's better than Lazarus?

MarkMLl

[marcov]

...and that's leaving out things that they shed relatively early like Prolog.

And Paradox and Dbase (after they merged with Ashton Tate)

I also have a nearly mint copy of Object Vision for sale :-)

[duralast]

Which takes us back to one facet of the original question: what (if anything) does Oracle have as a development tool that's better than Lazarus?

I wouldn't say better, because something like this is subjective, but Oracle Developer Studio (formerly Solaris Studio) was useful and nice. It was available for C, C++, Fortran and Java, but Larry might have abandoned it.

[MarkMLl]

I wouldn't say better, because something like this is subjective, but Oracle Developer Studio (formerly Solaris Studio) was useful and nice. It was available for C, C++, Fortran and Java, but Larry might have abandoned it.

Ok, so /please/: can you give us highlights?

Without any doubt, Oracle got some very useful stuff from Sun and from server-side Netscape, but at the same time I strongly suspect that they (and for that matter IBM) have always been 20 years ahead of the pack when things like database replication and pooling are considered.

MarkMLl

[VisualLab]

• microcontroller programming (assembler, C),

You forgot Pascal there, it was once the most used language for micro-controllers.

It wasn't quite oblivion. Anyway, I know about Turbo51 and microPascal. I don't know of any other Pascal implementations for microcontrollers. Besides, I have been using mikroPascal for hobby purposes since 2008. I bought it (i.e. mikroPascal Pro for PIC) together with MikroElektronika's EasyPIC5 board, PIC16F887 microcontroller and several modules. Then I bought a PIC18F4550.[/list]

[VisualLab]

• their composition includes "peas and cabbage" mixed together,

But at least they don't split "Pascal" and "Delphi", as many "pundits" have.

MarkMLl

Nowadays. But until a few years ago they kept them separate. Only after many skirmishes could them (TIOBE) be straightened out.

[VisualLab]

Sorry, I'm not a political scientist. According to the TIOBE index, Object Pascal saves the world in 11th place. It's not bad?
https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

The problem is that the TIOBE list "sucks".

Pascal occupies a higher position in the "sucks" TIOBE index  (11th place) than PYPL (29th place), or IEEE Spectrum (45th place).

You are right to point out. In the case of PYPL and IEEE Spectrum the situation is even worse than with TIOBE. Regarding point (2) that I made earlier, this is an even worse garbage dump than TIOBE. In particular, what is available from IEEE Spectrum (e.g. for 2023). The latter list also included HTML! This is complete idiocy. A website with the abbreviation of a serious institution (IEEE) in its name should present a sensible summary, not senseless spam. In such a situation, there is no point in even checking their method of calculating the popularity of a given programming language (because it is most likely done wrong).

The list of the most popular IDEs included in the PYPL (for 2024) also presents a surprising level of idiocy. Commercial mixed with free ones, code editors with typical IDEs. Lazarus is not there at all.

[VisualLab]

• microcontroller programming (assembler, C),

You forgot Pascal there, it was once the most used language for micro-controllers.

Rubbish. Absolute and total tosh. Twaddle. Dare I say it... ox-droppings.

The traditional language for microcontrollers was assembler, and very /very/ slowly started moving towards C when the Intel 8051 replaced the 8048.

First of all: in the category of microcontrollers, I listed assembler in the first place (and for good reason). Secondly: my statement was about the current state, not history (maybe I should have written it clearly). Third: I would love to see Pascal more widely used for programming microcontrollers.[/list]

[marcov]

I think grids are a major problem, unless presented read-only to provide context for a current-row edit.

If you let the designtime only tools handle everything yes. But as said, most big applications don't, even if only they want to have more control over transactions.  IMHO it is unfair to compare  Delphi/Lazarus level 0 (all design time, without much errorhandling) to fully blown business apps without context.

And still you can get pretty far quickly with level 0. I have done pretty serious database apps in a previous job, but in our current very small job I happily use designtime components. Time saver, and the connection problems are not that important in this age of fiber to the home, and with 1 1/2 user there is only transactional security on certain main tables.

I agree, and I'm not necessarily hostile to that. However I'd like to backtrack and highlight Thaddy's blaming of the Tories (the UK's right-wing party) for the PO debacle: historically, all major parties tried to favour ICL, with the Tories possibly less to blame since their approach (if given free reign) would have been to divest the state of all involvement and favour the market economy.

That is a dud too. Any one who took some economy classes knows that the classic market economy has certain border conditions (like many producers and many consumers which can't influence price on their own). Only in those conditions you really get "market" conditions. In privatisation scenarios those rarely hold true.

Basically it is just washing their hands so they can blame the "market" if it fails, while making sure their cronies get a updated salary "according to market standards" for as long as it lasts.

[gidesa]

Pascal occupies a higher position in the "sucks" TIOBE index  (11th place) than PYPL (29th place), or IEEE Spectrum (45th place).

But, besides bad opinions on Tiobe (I have that), Ob.Pas. has  only 1,52 percent. Compare to sum of first 5 languages: 49,7 percent.
That is, apart the first 5-6 languages, the rest is residual, because all other 45 languages (recent and legacy) in total reach only 50 percent!
So it's a pity, but also Tiobe index is not very good for Pascal.