Two competing languages with very similar audience. Not apples vs. oranges like java (web, android) vs. object pascal (desktop). Your thoughts?
The following are my personal views, and may perhaps not be supported by anyone else anywhere:
1.
Mutual Exclusivity Fallacy: There is no law against having or using multiple languages. Those who perhaps like BASIC, and see value in some of the features or advantages offered by it, are both (a) likely to avail themselves of those advantages, and (b) free to do so.
2.
False Equivalence Fallacy: You appear to suggest that the audience for both FreeBasic and FPC is the same, although you did not provide any information to substantiate that conclusion. A glance at the target platforms available to both communities readily suggests a significant variance in the communities. FreeBasic appears to support only
Windows, DOS, Linux and FreeBSD. FreePascal supports
all these, plus many more platforms.
3.
Inherent Competition Fallacy: This is somewhat tied to item #1, in that there is this suggestion that the growth of some tool or platform must come at the expense of others, and thus, it is important for platform A to adopt as many things as possible to avoid "losing" to other platforms. If there were mutual exclusivity in tool/platform use, then this would be an issue. But there is not.
4.
Zero-Sum Game Fallacy: Adding features -- even when warranted or desirable -- is not a zero sum game. There are costs in terms of development time, QA time and ongoing support. And that is a very casual outline of the considerations. Consideration for the following has not even been mentioned:
-- Overall project goals (how does the request sync up with the overall objectives?)
-- Backwards compatibility (how does the proposed feature impact existing code?)
-- Cross-platform supportability (how does the new feature get supported across all platforms)
-- Who will regression test?
-- Who will maintain going forward?
-- What are the overall implications to the platform?
-- Does the proposed advantages outweigh the expected (and inevitable) costs?
This kind of thread shows up with regularity -- and in the past 6-12 months, I have seen many variations of it -- yet the practical implications of the work needed are rarely considered. Only the nebulous and unquantifiable benefits of increased popularity are offered, whatever they might turn out to be.
I do understand the idea of liking a particular tool (tool A) in most respects, but wishing it had one specific feature of another tool (tool B) to address some gap I feel in the feature set. I have on numerous occasions (and as recently as a few months ago), made such a request to a commercial organization to see if they would be inclined to add the feature. But I offered it from my perspective as a personal benefit, and not as something essential for their survival, or as a sure-fire way for them to compete successfully with someone else.
A claim of speed was made, for which I would love to see the code that was used for the comparison -- else it is highly subjective or theoretical.
If
FreeBasic suits ones needs most of the time, perhaps one would be better off using
FreeBasic most of the time...
If
FreeBasic has such great features that it would be desirable to see them in
FreePascal (vs just using
FreeBasic outright), then it stands to reason that
FreeBasic also has some deficiencies compared to
FreePascal that makes is less than desirable to change development platforms. I wonder what these deficiencies are?