Object Pascal decline?

[marcov]

You are assuming that I am  criticising the Pascal language or Lazarus/FPC developers but that's not my case.

In retrospect that sounded more harsh than I meant it, I'm not criticizing you, nor your ideas. Such schemes (in application languages) certainly have merit. I merely point out that the overlap with the combined Lazarus/FPC project's direction is very low (except for that COM support is getting better and better).

I also didn't mean to send you away or anything like that. It was merely meant as a "don't hold your breath", and maybe encourage you to look for some other language or embedded interpreter for in-application uses.

The decline of Pascal is not a matter of lacking new converts, but existing users choosing other languages, not because they are superior but because the developing environments suit their all round needs better.

I don't agree. I mainly think users chose development systems due to their attachment to large IT vendors, not based on merits of language and environment in itself.  The big problem there is that Borland/Embaradero simply is not in the Microsoft/IBM/Oracle/Apple/Google league.

And the OP is right, Borland/Embarcadero messed it up, or a lot of the team left Borland for Microsoft to go and develop C#.

Borland/Embacadero messed up a lot, that's for sure. However that doesn't necessarily mean that if they hadn't, the outcome would be vastly different. I think it would mostly been gradually different (exactly
the same situation, with some more life in the Delphi platform. But certainly not more dominant or on equal footing with MS offerings)

The sign of times in the early 2000s was simply that major IT vendors wanted more control over their developers and did that by offering own toolchains. Mostly to better steer the direction of their targets, and as a conduit to the developers (read: to sell additional products, think about e.g. SharePoint server, SQL Server etc). That had two effects: they could give their own toolchain preferential treatment, and it made life harder financially for 3rd party vendors (they had to invest more to keep up, while their user bases were decimated), while the major vendors partially wrote of the toolchain expenses on the "main" business.

Ideally you would want to use the same language for everything everywhere, but if your preferred language works only as a compiler then it gets frustrating, but that is not the fault of Lazarus/FPC developers or Embarcadero for that matter because those tools were developed to serve application developers needs.

I'm also not really sure with that statement. Yes, I don't want to use TOO many languages since that makes life hard. On the other hand, as soon as adding compatibility for targets that I rarely use start to influence my main target in a negative way, I often prefer splitting development environments and codebases (IOW not one codebase for all).

Simply because the main business brings in the bacon, and while more targets is nice, usually the newer targets are either temporary or a side business.

[marcov]

If I remember rightly borland gave away Delphi-3 desktop edition free for home
users on a magazine cover.

They kept that up till D7 I think.  Though in later times afaik you did have to do a (free) registration before use. My current Delphi license originally was an upgrade from such free magazine D7 version. (iow I upgraded to the full D2005 product for Eur 250 in total, and later to D2009 for another E250. After that, they stopped these kinds of promotions, and instead the annual recurring offer was not a discount, but merely an "upgrade from any version")
.
Of course in D2006 there was Turbo Explorer, which was really nice except that IIRC you couldn't use TSpinEdit and TChart designtime. (but you could runtime instantiate them). We actually used that professionally at work for several years, since it sufficed for our purposes at the time, and had no silly registration limitation (despite being fully licensed D2006 users!). 

Later, we started selling applications internationally (including Russia, so minimalistic workarounds to keep German, Dutch and French accents were not enough), and we upgraded to D2009 to easier do the internationalization. (in retrospect, we never used Borland/Embarcadero's translation stuff, but ended up using dxgettext. It is easier in D2009 then in old versions though, since literals and everything are unicode, and resourcestrings are automatically translated and don't need helper functions (like loadresstring in older Delphi's) to use)

Currently we use XE3 for all applications that we sell. We use Lazarus for a few internal applications and services.

[kapibara]

ObjectPascal is a pearl that will shine for ever.  Its the worlds most productive language. At least for me.

[jwhitten]

I think the issue is not Object Pascal, it is having a Pascal development environment that solves computer users needs and not only program/application developers needs. It is clear that a lot of FreePascal users are hobbyists/users and a compiled system does not serve their needs well enough.

Object Pascal is a developer rather than and end user oriented language. Even when you are using it for hobbyists/personal needs you still work in a developer oriented mindset. Compile time and run time errors virtually guarantee that. Using Access or Excel is more user-oriented, when there is an error you are dropped into the debugger and can probably continue after changing some variables, without having to restart. The application itself is equally the end user and the developer environment. Python, Ruby, LISP etc are also the same.

Personally, I'd be in fat city if there was ever a thing for Perl that worked like Lazarus does for Pascal. I know there have been many attempts in the past. The road is littered with dead bodies and broken shells of all the "Delphi/Lazarus/VBasic" Perl wannabies. But none of them have ever had the class or pizzazz of Delphi (now, IMO, Lazarus-- Delphi has become Fat Elvis in Vegas as far as I'm concerned).

I can't tell you how many times I've been writing my application in Lazarus/Pascal and wishing there was something similar for Perl. Or even PHP.

I like Pascal just fine, and for me, Lazarus brings back lots of good old memories of the early days of Delphi, when it was still young and fresh and going places-- oh, and affordable. I bought my last copy of Delphi at $400 bucks in the mid-90's. Then they hit the nosebleed section and it was too rich for me. And I think maybe for a lot of other people as well. I suspect that the price of Delphi and similar products from other companies were heavily instrumental in driving the adoption and popularity of other paradigms, such as Java and the whole Web movement, where all you needed to join was a JVM and/or a Web Browser.

I think there was a time that Borland and Embarca-whatever-the-heck-they're-called could have ruled the Internet, or at the very least, carved out a pretty hefty chunk of it to share with the likes of MicroSh*t and their 'Adopt and Pervert' strategy. But unlike MicroSh*t, Borland didn't have the world by the short and curlies when it came to Operating Systems and monopolistic practices.

[bylaardt]

Price is problem?

Bet in in RAD? in multiplatforms? in Linux? in android?

if you believe the "generation Y" worry is memory use or executable size or lib sharing, your best shot is "C".
otherwise if you believe in productivity and fast solutions your best shot is Objectpascal.

PS: In my opinion the 70's languages are eternals.

[splikz]

Hello.
I decided to learn how to program by myself. and tested several languages. and found object pascal to be very friendly. and lazarus is a great tool.
I have no previous coding experience with any language... but I noticed a couple things:

> on the free side, there are resources, but some are not documented enough for beginners.
> there are books, but most of them are directed towards classic desktop applications.
> there's a certain lack of free & well organized intermediate and advanced video tutorials. (for c++ and c# there are tons of them. example: https://buckysroom.org/videos.php?cat=16)
> the most popular game engines do not support pascal. and the existent pascal engines seam too basic.
> the lack of modern advanced libraries like JUCE Cross-Platform library for C++ or VSTgui
> no easy integration with android or ios! there are embarcadero alternatives for mobile development, but they are very underrated http://smartmobilestudio.com/category/news/
> some projects with potential are stagnated!
> on the vst development, there are people porting stuff from c++, but it is not finished or uptodate! http://sourceforge.net/projects/delphiasiovst/ or http://www.axiworld.be/vst.html

I wish there was more demand for this language. that would be an incentive for people to keep developing their projects.
my goal was to learn object pascal in other to port Juce! because my interest is mainly audio development. and eventually mobile development as well.

[janvb]

Hello.
I decided to learn how to program by myself. and tested several languages. and found object pascal to be very friendly. and lazarus is a great tool.
I have no previous coding experience with any language... but I noticed a couple things:

> on the free side, there are resources, but some are not documented enough for beginners.
> there are books, but most of them are directed towards classic desktop applications.
> there's a certain lack of free & well organized intermediate and advanced video tutorials. (for c++ and c# there are tons of them. example: https://buckysroom.org/videos.php?cat=16)
> the most popular game engines do not support pascal. and the existent pascal engines seam too basic.
> the lack of modern advanced libraries like JUCE Cross-Platform library for C++ or VSTgui
> no easy integration with android or ios! there are embarcadero alternatives for mobile development, but they are very underrated http://smartmobilestudio.com/category/news/
> some projects with potential are stagnated!
> on the vst development, there are people porting stuff from c++, but it is not finished or uptodate! http://sourceforge.net/projects/delphiasiovst/ or http://www.axiworld.be/vst.html

I wish there was more demand for this language. that would be an incentive for people to keep developing their projects.
my goal was to learn object pascal in other to port Juce! because my interest is mainly audio development. and eventually mobile development as well.

Thanks for the link to JUICE, I want to look into the status/design of that myself.

As for your notes - I am new here myself and I agree that many things are work in progress at present. But I believe that will change over time as more and more people get involved. This community seem to be picking up new members at a fast rate these days.

[JD]

> the lack of modern advanced libraries like JUCE Cross-Platform library for C++ or VSTgui

Didn't know about the JUCE library. I'm more familiar with wxWidgets myself. Thanks for the info.

JD

[marcov]

I don't know Juce either, but it is strange to compare C++ libraries like this to FPC/Delphi.

The C++ library must do so many things at once because the portable subset of C++ is so small (basically only STL, not platform dependent), while by Delphi/Lazarus the GUI is already part of the standard offering.

So it is not logical to expect something as Juce on Delphi/Lazarus since it fixes a specific C++ problem. Apples and oranges.

[Rails]

> the lack of modern advanced libraries like JUCE Cross-Platform library for C++ or VSTgui

Didn't know about the JUCE library. I'm more familiar with wxWidgets myself. Thanks for the info.

JD

According to the JUCE website, closed source applications require a commercial license, unlike wxWidgets. JUCE is also a one man show, with all that implies for future maintainability.

[vick]

That's an interesting discussion. I'm very new to Pascal (but not to programming) and I can already tell that Delphi is simply not competitive. Why would I want to pay 1000 (or whatever) dollars for Delphi 'Professional Edition' (or whatever) when I can pay 0 dollars for Eclipse and JVM? Why would I want to pay 200 dollar for some 'Starter Edition' when I can pay 0 for VS Express? Not even to mention C++, or Python, or... I'm sure Delphi is nice, but there is no way for it to be nice enough to beat that. 30 day trial? No, thanks.
I believe if the programming language Pascal has any future, it can only be Free Pascal. That's just the economic reality.

[taazz]

That's an interesting discussion. I'm very new to Pascal (but not to programming) and I can already tell that Delphi is simply not competitive. Why would I want to pay 1000 (or whatever) dollars for Delphi 'Professional Edition' (or whatever) when I can pay 0 dollars for Eclipse and JVM? Why would I want to pay 200 dollar for some 'Starter Edition' when I can pay 0 for VS Express? Not even to mention C++, or Python, or... I'm sure Delphi is nice, but there is no way for it to be nice enough to beat that. 30 day trial? No, thanks.
I believe if the programming language Pascal has any future, it can only be Free Pascal. That's just the economic reality.

I do not see microsoft giving away their more advanced IDEs. The debugging along is on an other level. I haven't seen any C, C++ IDEs that are on the same level of lazarus and delphi is leaps ahead in stability and speed from lazarus although for windows only, haven't tested qt's IDE though. As for eclipse, java, jvm etc last time I tried to use them they where a pain in the behind to start and work with it, they are memory hogs and slow as java not to mention ugly, they are not worth my time. Economics are a lot more than the price and delphi has a lot to give.

[vick]

And when did you start to use Delphi, Taaz? When it comes to attracting new programmers, the ones who don't know Delphi already, it just doesn't look that great. Yes, JVM takes forever to start, VS Express is limited and Windows-centric, 'C++ is a horrible language' (Linus Torvalds), Python... what Python? 2 or 3? Perl is write-only, PHP and JavaScript are just a joke... And you know what. I'm absolutely sure that Delphi is not without it's big issues either. Like... the whole thing about it dying?

Economics are a lot more than the price and delphi has a lot to give.

Sure. And so do all these other languages I mentioned.  JVM is a brilliant piece of software. C# is an excellent programming language (From what I heard). Python is simple and straightforward and always tries to Do The Right Thing. Do you know just how easy it is to count the number of characters in a string in Perl? Not bytes, not codepoints, but real characters. mod_php won the Internet (including this forum), and Javascript is already installed on almost every computer on this planet. C++ has it's ridiculously optimized compilers, and enormous codebase (including that C part, naturally). You see, other languages are not without their strengths.

[janvb]

I believe if the programming language Pascal has any future, it can only be Free Pascal. That's just the economic reality.

This is the same for a majority of infrastructure components these days.

[taazz]

And when did you start to use Delphi, Taaz?

Delphi 3 when delphi had standard, pro, enterprise PSUs with standard costing 300 to 400 euros and pro around 900. From that time the only thing that has changed is that the standard has been stopped and a new more expensive delphi was introduced

Economics are a lot more than the price and delphi has a lot to give.

Sure. And so do all these other languages I mentioned.  JVM is a brilliant piece of software. C# is an excellent programming language (From what I heard). Python is simple and straightforward and always tries to Do The Right Thing. Do you know just how easy it is to count the number of characters in a string in Perl? Not bytes, not codepoints, but real characters. mod_php won the Internet (including this forum), and Javascript is already installed on almost every computer on this planet. C++ has it's ridiculously optimized compilers, and enormous codebase (including that C part, naturally). You see, other languages are not without their strengths.

never said the opposite, every language has its strengths, the main problem with your statement is that you focused on the price naming it "economics" and dismissing all the strong points of delphi as "who is going to see them?".

You want to know if delphi/ free pascal is the right tool for you? Sure give it a try post your requirements and I for one will try to post a couple of fast and dirty  implementations to give you a quick look on the language and its features. Throwing around statements like "pascal is dead/dying", "over priced" etc is....... well a very newbe mistake and I for one will not waste my time on a newbe that keeps his eyes closed.

Finally have you seen the productivity boost delphi offers? Keep in mind that for windows development lazarus is behind in productivity from delphi at least 30%. So all in all what are the economics of your project?