Who are the Pascal lovers ?

[Kays]

Well money is certainly involved in paying to influence people To do things not in their best interest. […]

I maintain it’s not just “involved” but the key factor. Reality check:

• When’s the last time you heard/read in the news “major security flaw in Linux!”
• When’s the last time you heard/read in the news “Detrimental security bug: Update your Windoze systems now!”

I’d claim Linux is a great GPOS, it should have, like, a 98% market share, but instead roughly 90% are dominated by commercial/evil operating systems. Is Linux so bad? For Linux there’s even the LPIC – the Linux Professionals Institute Certificate.

[Joanna from IRC]

  FPC is a community driven project. Just look at the names on the python sponsoring page: https://www.python.org/psf/sponsors/

Just looking at who is sponsoring python makes me want to run the other way. I don’t think these big companies are content to just sponsor and control a language they want to get rid of all independent alternatives to what they are sponsoring to gain more control. Both fpc and irc are too independent for their liking.

I maintain it’s not just “involved” but the key factor. Reality check:
When’s the last time you heard/read in the news “major security flaw in Linux!”
When’s the last time you heard/read in the news “Detrimental security bug: Update your Windoze systems now!” 

Linux definitely has less security flaws than windows . I don’t know much about linux but isn’t the “blob” closed source? Sometimes vulnerabilities or malicious code are snuck into linux as well. {I follow #security channel } Also Microsoft has become interested in Linux with intentions that are probably not altruistic..

As for the windows having endless updates all the time it amazes me to no end how complacent people are about constantly getting “fixes“ from people who couldn’t do things right to begin with. Yes I understand that computer code is always evolving but I think there is more to it than that.

Computer applications have become just another cheap shoddy product for people to consume and discard. The corporations who are responsible for disasters caused by bad computer code are never going to be held accountable.

For these reasons I prefer fpc even if it has become niche Language. I am curious though if people trying to get rid of pascal have ever whispered bad unsolicited advice to the fpc devs in private. I have experienced this phenomenon of bad advice myself on more than one occasion from troublemakers.

[lainz]

I contributed doing this website some time ago:
https://packages.lazarus-ide.org/

I think FPC can compete with any language, but a lot of marketing should be involved, and seems that part is not of much interest.

FPC is a community driven project. Just look at the names on the python sponsoring page: https://www.python.org/psf/sponsors/

Comparing FPC to super large scale projects like Python is pretty pointless.

I'm comparing a website not a language.

Adding these links should not be hard or yes maybe 

[dtoffe]

In addition to what @marcov mentioned...

One of the problems is that educational institutions are very rarely teaching _programming_, what they teach instead is a programming language and, there is an _enormous_ difference between the two (this is not new... this has been going on for many decades.)  That's one of the reasons there are programmers out there who cannot write a program unless the programming language supports OOP.    Basically, since they have not been taught programming, their mind is trapped in whatever programming language paradigm/straightjacket they were taught.

Back in 1989 at https://exa.unicen.edu.ar, first year of the Software Engineer degree, for the second class of Programming I, we were asked to bring a deck of common Spanish suited cards. We were given a set of instructions to operate on stacks of cards, test the topmost card for suit and value and create new stacks, do choices and repetitions. We quickly learned to write programs to, for example, shuffle the deck, separate into suits and order each suit by value. Finally, we would then "run" and test the programs, well, by hand, of course !

Daniel

[alpine]

In addition to what @marcov mentioned...

One of the problems is that educational institutions are very rarely teaching _programming_, what they teach instead is a programming language and, there is an _enormous_ difference between the two (this is not new... this has been going on for many decades.)  That's one of the reasons there are programmers out there who cannot write a program unless the programming language supports OOP.    Basically, since they have not been taught programming, their mind is trapped in whatever programming language paradigm/straightjacket they were taught.

Back in 1989 at https://exa.unicen.edu.ar, first year of the Software Engineer degree, for the second class of Programming I, we were asked to bring a deck of common Spanish suited cards. We were given a set of instructions to operate on stacks of cards, test the topmost card for suit and value and create new stacks, do choices and repetitions. We quickly learned to write programs to, for example, shuffle the deck, separate into suits and order each suit by value. Finally, we would then "run" and test the programs, well, by hand, of course !

Daniel

I'm glad to hear somebody used that approach, IMHO it always should start that way. And after that some Pascal-derived language should follow to teach how to describe the algorithms in a most structured way. And then everything else.
It is very unfortunate that most professors think that is below their level or below the level of a university education.
Starting with e.g. C/C++ can have quite detrimental effect of the fresh student minds.

[Joanna from IRC]

Most of the things we do everyday are programs. Getting dressed for instance is a very complicated algorithm if it was to be written out with all the possible conditionals. Finding correct clothes, checking if they are clean and undamaged. Removing existing clothing if needed , putting clothes on correctly. It’s all very complicated

[berningo]

From https://blog.synopse.info/?post/2022/11/26/Modern-Pascal-is-Still-in-the-Race:

A recent poll on the Lazarus/FPC forum highlighted a fact: pascal coders are older than most coders. Usually, at our age, we should be managers, not developers. But we like coding in pascal. It is still fun after decades!

Well, it does not necessarily need to be a contradiction. You can be a manager in daytime and a Pascal coder after calling it a day. I do not want to deal with complex Makefiles on different OS when I want to use wxWidgets for cross-platform tools, for instance. I feel that the build tools distract me and take too much of my precious (quality) time. CMake does not improve the situation for me either.

PS: I am aware that this thread is old, but my post fits perfectly to the poll.