Hi all,
Interesting discussion that was bound to happen at some point.
As a long-time (+30 year) user of the language and many years of
FreePascal and Lazarus, I did not mean to pile on too much, but it looks
like I may. Sorry.
From what I read so far, my views match well those of Nikolay and Luca.
Maybe age has to do with it or that my projects are rarely GUI apps and
mostly low-level API programming where I barely make use of generics and
where try to avoid classes and managed data structures as much as
possible. I value less the looks and new language features but more the
low-level programming power, the stability of the compiler, build tools
and the the accuracy of the documentation. I am very grateful that
FreePascal and Lazarus do exist, as imperfect as they may be!
My higher level, less API-oriented, dynamic programming needs are
currently met by the Python+VSCode combination as we gave up on NodeJS
a while ago. This also matches the needs of many of my students that are
doing data analytics, data visualization and occasionally simple GUI
apps, employing rather cumbersome tools based on quirky frameworks such
as Tk and maybe Wx. Here is where RAD tools are helpful and why some may
take a liking to C#. But as much as I would like them to, many I know
are less likely to program embedded devices or to build low-level or
complex GUI applications that need to squeeze every ounce of
performance. Yet to me personally the need of low-level programming
remains relevant. This is why I would still prefer a stable fpc compiler
with macros, build tools and easy to configure targets, similar in power
to gcc but hopefully less cumbersome and with faster compile times. It
would also form a solid enough foundation to allow many other things to
be built with it.
Stefan
On 10/17/24 06:47, Luca Olivetti via fpc-pascal wrote:
El 16/10/24 a les 5:00, Hairy Pixels via fpc-pascal ha escrit:
Even if there is a market for Lazarus type apps people in 2024 don’t
want to use a massive legacy IDE and prefer better tools like VSCode.
I'm biased because I've been programming in pascal for almost 40 years,
starting with line editors/command line compilers and linkers (*), using
clipper for the user interface (anybody remembers it? the syntax for
defining input fields was way better that doing it in basic, yes, plain
old ms dos basic), marvelling at what was possible with delphi (even if
at the time it had no autocompletion or other smarts) then switching to
lazarus 20 years ago.
So I mostly do "old style" gui applications (which, btw, have to work
24/7 unattended), but not only.
I recently had to use other ides for other languages (personal projects
in C/C++), one of them VSCode and I find it a steaming pile of s*it,
bloated and its "smart" features barely work (it's probably me though).
Good luck trying to design a GUI with it (I think that even clipper was
way better for that).
Same experience with eclipse and netbeans (I had to do some java work,
ouch), again, it's probably me, but good luck designing a GUI with those
(but at least the "smart" features work somewhat better).
So give me a "massive legacy IDE" that actually works any day, please.
I'm sure that this "massive legacy IDE" will allow me one day to design
web interfaces with the same ease that it now allows me to design an
"old style" gui application.
(*) programming embedded systems, so no debugger, not even writeln.
Bye
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