2012/2/25 Frank Church : > who ask themselves "If I am starting a new project, is Pascal the right one? > Of course not!"
I don't get that... why not? Pascal (or rather Object Pascal) is a brilliant language. It is easy to read and understand - even by non-Pascal developers (just like I can read and understand Java - thought I don't work commercially with Java projects). Also, using the right tools and frameworks with Free Pascal, you can create incredible applications in a very short time. Case in point... Our company needed a bug tracking tool, with some special features. We reviewed quite a few - nothing to our liking. In the end I said... "I had enough of reviews and wasting my time, I can build us something in a shorter period it took us to review all the other choices." I made this a challenge. I jotted down the basic requirements that we would need to make a bug tracker usable for us. I started from scratch, using FPC as compiler. Lazarus IDE as my editor, fpGUI as our UI toolkit, and tiOPF as our persistence / database laye, and tiSQLEditor to help me produce boiler plate code for tiOPF. 4 Hours later we had a working product that did everything we required! Another hour later, the database was loaded with all our existing bug reports, feature requests, attachments like images, sound clips etc. I would love to see somebody else do similar with other languages. Object Pascal is a very powerful language - just like C/C++, Java etc. I can create full blown GUI desktop app, CGI web apps, console apps etc. All with low system requirements, stand-alone executables (no runtime environments required) etc. Anything you can develop in another language, you CAN do in Object Pascal. I am very productive using Object Pascal, and I am pretty sure there are many others that can say the same. > In relation to Eclipse above, The minimum 2Gb or even 4Gb or RAM needed to > run Eclipse is not much these days. I still think that is crazy!!! [I don't care how cheap RAM has become] MSEide loaded with a large project, and after heavy use and debug sessions, uses a mere 30-60Mb RAM. And no, I don't believe MSEide and Eclipse are in the same league - I'm just pointing out the HUGE RAM usage difference (bloat in Eclipse)! But then, we all know that even a Java "hello world" app is memory hungry. If you really want to compare Java vs Java, then compare Eclipse to IntelliJ IDEA. The latter uses a fraction of the memory that Eclipse requires - and it is much faster too. > With Pascal I have to repeatedly > compile to track them down. Often it is also because most Pascal compilers are so damn fast! You don't need to waist development time to make the IDE guess any syntax errors while you type. Simply let the compiler tell you - because it can compile a project is seconds. Delphi is a case in point. > How about the reluctance to put documentation in library code? Have you ever seen Object Pascal code that is well documented, and that uses inline documentation (docs inside the source code units)??? The documentation obfuscates the code so much, it is damn hard to read the actual code. We had this problem with tiOPF, and since moved to fpdoc style documentation. The other problem of inline documentation in Object Pascal, is due to the Object Pascal syntax. Java, C# etc don't have interface sections and implementation sections. So having to document a method of a class in Java or C#, only has one location. In Object Pascal you have two locations to think of. I'm sorry, but seeing it for my own eyes, I MUCH prefer having the documentation separated from the source code. All you need is a easy to use documentation generator (we have fpdoc) and maybe some IDE integration (Lazarus does, by being able to read the XML documentation files directly), and you have no problems at all with separated documentation. NOTE: When I say "documentation", I don't mean a one liner summary, I mean clear documentation with at least 3+ paragraphs minimum for every procedure, function or identifier. Such long text do not belong mixed up inside Object Pascal source code! -- Regards, - Graeme - _______________________________________________ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://fpgui.sourceforge.net -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
