[Lazarus] Name "Free Pascal Compiler & Lazarus"

[Juha Manninen]

On 2010/02/04 07:56 AM, Martin wrote:
> I had the "National Geographic" impression too... I did like the 
> proposal from Bee Jay ( 
> http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/676/lazwebnewsubpage030210.png  )
>
I don't like the gradient fill blue (old fashioned) and even less the 
idea of rotating banners in that position (annoying), but we are getting 
somewhere with these proposals...
> But yes whatever icon/animal, IMHO it should be one of the ones 
> already in use.
>
>>
>> A related topic that's been bothering me: can we please discuss a 
>> name change for Lazarus as well? It's not like a name change will 
>> hurt the project at this stage, methinks...
>>
>  -1
>
> I don't see why changing the name. Any Name except for "Pascal 
> RAD-IDE" needs branding => users have to learn to associate it with a 
> pascal RAD-IDE.
Well, perhaps there are other people that are having the same experience 
as myself: When people ask me what I use for developing my software the 
answer is usually "Free Pascal & Lazarus". The response is /aways/ a 
puzzled look or a pause on the other end of the phone line, but my 
concern is that it doesn't even sound cool. A puzzled+mildly_impressed 
look would be so much better than a puzzled+what_is_this_guy_smoking? 
look. There are so many cool sounding programming languages out there, 
like "Python" or "Ruby on Rails" (check their website for a simple and 
to-the-point extremely newbie friendly home page: 
http://rubyonrails.org/). When you say "Free Pascal & Lazarus", someone 
who knows a little about computer science will immediately think of an 
old teaching language that nobody uses (well, that's what they think) 
but the rest would have forgotten the word "Pascal" whilst digesting the 
word "Lazarus". "Hmmm, wasn't that some dude mentioned in the Bible?". 
The symbology of some project "raised from the dead" will be lost on 
most people, I think, and perhaps that is a good thing. Who cares if the 
project was once dead? What matters is that it is now an incredibly 
lively project! Besides, there might be many people in this community 
who objects to that part of "written history"...

Perhaps my problem is with the separation of the IDE and the language. I 
don't say "Object Pascal & Delphi". The word "Delphi" serves as a 
complete description to those who know what it is, while sounding mildly 
cool to those who don't have a clue. (In fact, it seems many people who 
have heard of both Delphi and VB think that the former is some kind of 
clone of the latter!). People who don't know much about Delphi, don't 
associate it with Pascal, they just have this vague idea that it is that 
VB-like thing that is a bit cooler and can create apps faster. Then also 
the word "Free". Aren't nearly all (cool) programming languages free? In 
English, as you know, it is unfortunate that free is used more in the 
beer context than in the speech context. It simply doesn't sound "cool" 
anymore. Furthermore, I don't think the current $modes supported by FPC 
can be called Pascal anymore. They are far removed Pascal-like dialects, 
a bit like Afrikaans that originated from Dutch, 300 years ago, and used 
to be called "Kitchen Dutch". That might as well have been "Free 
Dutch"... At least "Object Pascal" implies that the original Pascal 
language was heavily modified. "Free" implies no such thing.

Why this heavy emphasis on exterior appearances (ie. being "cool")? all 
the uber geeks might ask. It is important because most decision makers, 
clients and users are not geeks. These people need to feel good about 
the money they are spending. I believe a large part of Oracle's success 
can be attributed to the really cool name. (What an amazingly cool name 
for such a cr at p database, and don't tell me "Delphi" wasn't inspired by 
"Oracle"). Just look around you and see all the billboards with pretty 
people on them. This is the society we live in, like it or not. I don't, 
but if we want to be anti-establishment, why not just change the name to 
something really horrible and spell it with all small caps...... like 
git. (ouch)

Just my 2c :-)

Paul.