Who are the Pascal lovers ?

[440bx]

that 30 to 49 range didn't help at all but...

from the poll and the data gathered by @Martin_fr, it can be seen that programmers under the age of 30 that use FPC is _less_ than 10 percent of the entire population.

That is a problem.  The language is not attracting new blood and without new blood its future may simply be eventually non-existent.

Apparently, there is at some factual support to the common belief that Pascal programmers are "old-timers" (language die-hards )

[Thaddy]

I happen to know there is an other correlation:
Cat 40-60+ has an over-representation of academics in the M.sc and Ph.D categories, which may be explained by the fact that Pascal in that time frame was taught at University, which it usually isn't anymore except for some countries.
Cat 40-60+ also tend to be proficient in - many - more than one programming language. Which may be explained that with a proper Pascal background it is very easy to actually understand most other programming languages, more so than Python.

Maybe we can query that too... both need to be tested..

[440bx]

@Thaddy,

The problem is the very low percentage of Pascal programmers that are less than 30 years old.

[Thaddy]

@Thaddy,

The problem is the very low percentage of Pascal programmers that are less than 30 years old.

Yes, but the causal is - I suspect, consider it a premise - that Pascal has been mostly dropped in academics, whereas it was common for the age range I mentioned.
From 1982/3 onwards I taught Pascal at University to social science and economics students (UCSD on Apple IIe) as well as Basic, Fortran, Cobol and K&R C. (For Burroughs terminals and DEC VAX)
Nowadays it seems everything is Python and Js, not even C++ except for the more technical sciences. (C++ is not very good as an introduction to programming, but Python is)
So since Pascal originated as a teaching language, maybe we should promote modern pascal again as a teaching language. People might just remember old school Pascal leading to the common misconceptions about the modern language.

[Lansdowne]

The subset of humanity represented by the age statistics is actually the intersection of
Pascal lovers    and
Discussion forum lovers.

I tend to assume that most Forum type Web venues (tech, politics, health and wealth, anything) are mostly populated by older generations.

Plus there is the problem that a casual/hobby user of FPC/Lazarus ill not find it easy to find where to get help and find their way here

[Thaddy]

Plus there is the problem that a casual/hobby user of FPC/Lazarus ill not find it easy to find where to get help and find their way here

Yeah, but that is often a case of rt*m. Freepascal comes with excellent manuals. Many questions asked on this forum can be answered by referring to the official documentation. (and partially the wiki)

[Martin_fr]

from the poll and the data gathered by @Martin_fr, it can be seen that programmers under the age of 30 that use FPC is _less_ than 10 percent of the entire population.

Assuming that:
- They are equally present of this forum. That is that the same percentage of all pascal programmers aged 20-something and those in any of the higher aged groups are participating on this forum.
- That they are equally likely to specify there date of birth or participate in polls.

Also, it depends when and where the "new blood" is recruited. 20 something could mean at university. 30 something could mean during work-life.

And, if people where picking it up in their 20ties, then when exactly? If around 25, then that would already half the numbers for that group.
Of course the numbers we have are far lower. But then, if those people have support at university, they may not join the forum right then.

Next, we don't know at what age people of the higher age groups picked up Pascal. What if half of those aged 40+ picked it up in the last 10 or 20 years?
In other words, if those who picked up Pascal in the last 10,20 or 30 years where spread across all age groups, then the older a group, the longer that group had to accumulate members.


    There are to many unknown factors to take anything from those numbers.

[trev]

Ok, so I botched it too

I have re-done the age brackets taking into account all the comments and reset the vote to zero.

Sorry, you'll all need to vote again.

[Delphi 1 was my intro to Pascal while working in R&D at a publishing company.]

[440bx]

Next, we don't know at what age people of the higher age groups picked up Pascal. What if half of those aged 40+ picked it up in the last 10 or 20 years?

That would be interesting to know.  I _speculate_ that the majority picked it up during he time Turbo Pascal and Delphi were popular, i.e, roughly mid eighties to early 2000s.

There are to many unknown factors to take anything from those numbers.

I definitely have a tendency to agree with that but, being a Pascal "old-timer" myself (47 years programming, over 30 of them using Pascal among other languages) Pascal's history is also part of my history and, quite obvious that Pascal has lost an enormous amount of its popularity but, attempting to quantify that loss is fraught with problems (many of which you mentioned in your post.)


@trev

no biggie!

[bobby100]

If someone is already doing some SPS-programming in ST, Pascal is a "natural choice" to do something on PC.

I've learned TP in school (1992-1996, technician for electronics, somewhere in East Europe). In the fact, we learned GW Basic in the first year, and TP from 2nd year afterwards.
In my Electronics/Telecommunication studies (1996 - 2000), we learned Fortran77 on GCOS, and we did Motorola 6800 assembler (that is the right number of zeros, it is not a typo). Not that I got any use of that in my life...
A majority of my school colleagues picked up Delphi for programming after finishing the school. East Europe was Delphi/Pascal-oriented because of our school systems that didn't change for ages, or changed very slowly. It didn't pick up with the hype so easily.

In my 2nd studies (Software Engineering, 2003 - 2007, Vienna/Austria), it was everything oriented toward Java. C was used in Algorithm and Data structures lectures, and we did some Group/Collaboration projects in C# (on CVS server).
C# was OK, because it was "just a weird kind of Delphi", but I could never swallow Java or C.

My first try with Lazarus was writing of my BSc work - frontend for some shell code disassembler (don't know the name anymore). Working on Linux (RedHat) was a must. I had no other choice but Lazarus/GTK. It was PITA at the time because of the Unicode handling maturity in Lazarus/FPC (coming from Delphi, the whole UTFThis() and UTFThat() was too painful). That's the time I've got registered here on the forum.
Around this time I also wrote some WinCE software with Lazarus + KOL (I stil have a VM with this setup - Win XP, Lazarus 1.6 + KOL) for portable navigation devices (Becker, Navigon...), but I still preferred Delphi to Lazarus (VCL components for everything you'll ever need).

I got back to Lazarus a couple of years ago, after I've decided not to pay for Delphi anymore (my last version was XE. I've had D7 and D3 before it).
I was pleasantly surprised how far the Lazarus got in the meantime.

Now I am stuck here, with you guys.
(with "The league of extraordinary (older) gentlemen")

[simone]

I know Pascal because in the early 90s in my country (Italy) it was the de facto didactic standard to teach programming in the first computer science course at the university, both in the engineering and computer science faculties (with a few exceptions, which chose the C language). Furthermore, during my university studies, I was lucky enough to study Prolog and Lisp as well in the second computer course. With this approach, in my faculty of engineering, after the first two computer science courses the students knew the three main paradigms of the time: procedural, logical and functional. Only in the fourth year the C language was studied, in the course of operating systems. At the end of the 90s, with the explosion of the web, things changed: the desire to follow the market has oriented teachers towards Java.

After finishing my Ph.D., in the early 2000s, I knew Delphi was born in the meantime, but the developers I knew told me that Borland was in crisis and wasn't worth investing in its products. After, I have never encountered Delphi/Pascal in my work, perhaps because I haven't been directly involved in software development. A few years ago I accidentally met Lazarus and was delighted to be able to write code again in (object) pascal, for my personal projects. And I'm grateful to this community for this wonderful opportunity.

If I hadn't met Pascal at university, I wouldn't know this language today. The commercial dominance of web and mobile development will not allow the language to regain popularity until it becomes competitive in these market segments, as Delphi was in the 90s in the desktop development.

[silvestre]

During the 1990s in my academic computer studies (Spain), the languages of study were assembler and later Cobol for business. I started in my childhood with Thosiba HX-10 MSX 8 bit, which I still have! I got to know Pascal through a colleague in the last phase of training, where companies offered internships to students. A local software company developed everything in Pascal, and when I saw the easy-to-read and well-structured code, I never wanted to switch to other languages with obscure semantics. After Turbo-Pascal came Delphi, and now we are here with Freepascal/Lazarus. I'm in my 50s.

As Simone said, today the web has a lot of weight and at the same time the browser is at the centre of everything, that's why Javascript is so popular. Fortunately members of the development team are working on PAS2JS which allows a bridge between the desktop and the web world, I think it has great potential.

If I hadn't met Pascal at university, I wouldn't know this language today. The commercial dominance of web and mobile development will not allow the language to regain popularity until it becomes competitive in these market segments, as Delphi was in the 90s in the desktop development.

[Leledumbo]

Guess I'm gonna need to invite the whole Facebook group (I've joined like 3 or so) consisting of high school and college students specifically learning Pascal, they should be able to fill the under 30 options. Thousands of members, but sadly many don't understand English.

[VTwin]

My formal training was in FORTRAN, possibly BASIC in high school (USA). I learned Pascal in the early 80s after migrating from mainframes to microcomputers and TurboPascal. C and then C++ came next. I have dabbled in quite a few other languages, such as Python, R, and Julia, mostly experimentally. I use MATLAB/Octave when necessary.

I can't recall the numerous programming books I've read cover to cover, but they include K&R, Wirth, Stroustrup, and many others.

Ultimately, practicality, clarity, type safety, and ease of distribution led me (back) to Free Pascal.

[dbannon]

....
The problem is the very low percentage of Pascal programmers that are less than 30 years old.

OK, I am willing to take one for the team here !

If you have a way to wind my age back to 30 I'll do it, let me know what I need to do.....

Davo