Before ranting at me, please listen. I'm not joking. The very name
"Pascal" is the problem.
I'm no casual user.
I'm programming since the mid 60's. The first language I learned was
Fortran, but as soon as I met a structured language, like Algol, I
adopted it immediately. I became a fan of Pascal (which is a close son
of Algol) when it became available.
I've been using for a long time Intel's PLM, which is a dialect of PL1
clearly akin to Pascal/Algol. When Delphi was available I was delighted
to be able to program in Pascal again.
I've always tried to keep abreast of what's happening, with my
preference for a well structured language as Pascal in the first place.
Nevertheless, when recently I started looking into Lazarus, I was
convinced that the Pascal provided from FPC was the standard
old-fashioned Pascal, and that the class handling and all the object
oriented stuff was coming from a Lazarus pre-processor. I was astonished
to discover that FPC was actually an objective Pascal, and that the
Lazarus layer was just addding IDE and LCL.
This is my point: if an interested user which tries to keep up to date
isn't aware that today's FPC isn't the old Pascal, what's the chance
that a less interested user knows it?
I saw some time ago the suggestion of changing Lazarus name. That's not
the problem. The problem is Pascal's name!
Keeping a name almost 40 years old makes you think that it's a 40 years
old thing.
Let's call it Object-Pascal, O-Pascal, Pascal++, PascalPlus, whatever
you want, and the chances that someone will stop and give a look will
increase thousandfold.
Then all the "Marketing" can take place. We may explain that Lazarus is
based on PascalPlus. We may tell C++ programmers to forget about writing
and maintaining header files. Tell them that they can assign a property
with an := sign instead of using a setProperty or getProperty procedure,
that if they count the number of -> they type in place of a single dot,
the extra typing of C++ more than offsets the Pascal typing, etc. etc.
But first of all let the name carry the message: what we're speaking of
is a modern object oriented language.
Keep in mind that this holds true even for Delphi: the name doesn't
carry the thing. And this may explain some of its difficulties. Some 6
years ago (in one of the brightest moments in Delphi diffusion) I was
developing a Delphi application, but I needed in short time a Windows NT
driver for a special device. I needed to handle a high-speed custom
serial communication board, with a special protocol. I submitted the
problem to an expert NT developer, and he tried to convince me that I
couldn't possibly get the performance I wanted with Delphi, and
suggested to switch to C++. In the discussion which followed, I realized
that he believed Delphi to be an interpreted language, sort of Visual
Basic, and that he had no idea that it was object Pascal. Just one case,
but significant.
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