Hi jjb, On Sat, 2010-07-03 at 21:19 +0200, [email protected] wrote: > Message: 1 > Date: Sat, 3 Jul 2010 13:58:56 +0100 > From: jjb <[email protected]> > Subject: [Lazarus] Some information please > To: Lazarus mailing list <[email protected]> > Message-ID: > <[email protected]> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > I am an interested observer of Lazarus but I know very little about > it. > I am interested partly because Pascal was the first language I ever > used (it > formed a very small part of a non-CS degree.)
I first used Pascal in about 1989 when I started a Degree in Computing Studies at the Canberra College of Advanced Education (CCAE)... now the University of Canberra. I had a sound knowledge of BASIC and database design. I loved Pascal because I could use my BASIC skills with the structure of a strongly typed language and enumerated types and if... then... else and while... do loops (and repeat... until) etc. Remember that in those days I was used to using Commodore BASIC 4 which didn't even have an 'else' statement. The only way you could implement an 'else' was with goto. This taught me the evils of spaghetti-code by well intentioned programmers (amateur and professional) who over-used the goto statement and wrote code which was impossible to maintain without rewriting large chunks of code. It also taught me how to write code in BASIC without needing to use GOTO statements. > I understand that this is an open source project so I guess that those > who > develop it do so because they love it. > Are these people users of Lazarus in their day jobs or is Lazarus just > a > hobby that they don't ever expect to use professionally? At the Uni of Canberra (which the CCAE became when I studied there) we wrote code in Pascal (Apollo Domain Pascal), Turbo Pascal 3, 5, and 5.5, also C and C++, Assembler, Cobol, Prolog and various databases as well as lots of theory. Most of the students already knew Pascal from college so they skipped the lectures and formed groups of 3-5 and developed the assignments in groups. I was a bit of a loner so I wrote all of my assignments by myself. That's why I got 9+/10 for all my assignments (although I did not do well in exams). Those students who bludged on the group assignments failed the exams. The ones who actually wrote the code, usually only 1-2 of the groups did well in the exams, because the exam questions were based on the assignments. That's why I passed the exams. I had a good work ethic and wrote my assignments weeks in advance, living on campus and often computing late into the night. Other students left it all to 1-2 days before the assignments were due then panicked. I can recommend learning how to draw Nassi/Schniderman Charts for your procedures and making friends with computer lecturers and programmers. I wrote a NS chart for EVERY procedure of ALL my program code... and handed it in with a complete listing on 132 column paper. This was a requirement for the assignments. I don't draw NS charts any more but it is worth learning HOW to draw them. I prefer NS charts to flowcharts because with flowcharts it is too easy to write spaghetti-code. We were taught NS charts in the lectures but many students skipped the lectures. > I only found Lazarus by accident it seems to have a much lower profile > than > other open source stuff (eg python, php, java etc). > Is there a reason for this? > Where in the world is Lazarus popular/not so popular. I see that there > is a > german language textbook that may be translated to english sometime. I would like to see this book translated also. I have about 15-20 books on Delphi but none on Lazarus. Is there a good English lazarus textbook that we can buy??? Alternatively, is there a PDF version that I can download and send it to a photocopy shop for printing without infringing copyright laws??? URLs please??? > The level of skill in this mail group seems quite high. Do people come > to > Lazarus as already skilled programmers in other > languages as I don't see many newbies asking simple questions. > Or is it the case that people here are older on average and cut their > teeth > when Pascal was more popular? See my comment about about languages taught at Uni of Canberra. I loved Pascal because it was structured and typed in contrast to BASIC (in 1989) which I had a high skill level in. Also Pascal was standardised whereas BASIC was not. > I guess I'm asking in a roundabout way if this community is growing. > > I have read in Delphi discussions many times people talking about how > to > make the language more popular. > One of the issues always brought up is price. Lazarus doesn't have > this > problem so I wonder > if price is a factor in Delphi's relative unpopularity. Remember that Delphi 5 Standard was AUD$99 and it did not come with the source code for many units. If you wanted to get all the source code then you needed to buy Delphi 5 Enterprise for about AUD$2500-3000. Yes, cost was prohibitive to a hobby developer. That meant that often-times a developer would buy one particular version then resist upgrading. Also don't forget that if you wanted to port Delphi code from one version to the next one then you needed all the source code. If you just had the .TPU file and not the .pas file then you were stuffed. You either needed to find the .pas file or a replacement for it or rewrite it... which was not always practical. I worked for the Australian Navy as a Defence Public Servant and much of our communications programs were written in Turbo Pascal for OS/2 then ported to ADA and Visual Basic and C/C++. Ada was the Defence forces' standard programming language because of the work done with it in USA. When MS-Windows took off OS/2 lost popularity. I tried and failed to convince the bosses at work to port their Pascal and ADA code to Delphi. Delphi was not popular enough. They chose to rewrite a lot in MS C/C++ because that was a Micro$oft product and was officially supported by Micro$oft. I always thought that this was a big mistake but because I was a draftsman who also developed databases and websites and not a programmer, my advice was ignored. > My thinking is that languages need to get the kids interested and the > way to > do this is game development. > I believe that C++ is the language of the serious game developers. I > also > believe that object pascal provides > almost the same power as C++ but without a lot of the pain. Correct me > if I > am wrong as I don't know any of this from experience > only from reading. > I recently bought my 9 year old son this book The Game Maker's > Apprentice<http://www.amazon.com/Game-Makers-Apprentice-Development-Beginners/dp/1590596153/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278161293&sr=8-1> > and > he is working his way through it at the moment. Look at this page. https://sites.google.com/site/pewtas/home/delphi_source_code It is my Delphi Source code page on my personal website and contains about 11 Delphi open source games. None of them use graphic libraries. All code is for Delphi (5) and are fully working and fully debugged open source code & copyright to me. Feel free to port them to lazarus if you like to ... that is what I plan to do. Please, if you do port any of them or have problems with them then email me. Also, if you derive games from them then please credit my work in the about dialogue and send me a copy. The only one which uses graphics is Frog! Retro Remake Game which is my first graphics games and uses the Delphi graphics routines and my own unit for graphics which is strongly derived from OpenGL but without needing it. Instead I ported the unit for OpenGL Mono Fonts to Delphi 5 and rewrote it not require the OpenGL library. I have since written it to be improved but a minor bug prevents me from releasing my latest version of the new Frog! game. I *MAY* release it in about 2-4 months, depending on time, interest and priorities. > It comes with software enabling users to easily create 2D games with > all the > bells and whistles (lives, health, levels, explosions) and supplies > lots of resources (images and sounds) for sprites etc. For most of the > book > users learn to create games by instancing built-in objects > and altering their attributes and behaviour. Only later in the book is > coding introduced to enable users to extend beyond what's provided. > I think it's a wonderful but imagine if the language that was > introduced was > object pascal! OpenGL etc can do all that. I am not experienced in using these so I cannot provided examples. Look in the examples folder of lazarus and on the open source archives. Does someone have a URL for this??? > I would be grateful for any information. I has been my pleasure to answer your questions. Peter aka pew Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. -- Proudly developing Quality Cross Platform Open Source Games Since 1970 with a Commodore PET 4016 with 16 KRAM http://pews-freeware-games.org (<--- brand new -- still under development) -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
