[Lazarus] Some information please

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

jjb schrieb:

> I am an interested observer of Lazarus but I know very little about it.

You are welcome :-)


> 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.

IMO it's the bad price/value relationship, that made Delphi unpopular in 
the last years. The help was unusable for many years, still no 64 bit 
compiler available, that's what some high-end (paying) users didn't like 
very much. At the low end there are no really cheap Explorer versions 
right now, that could attract people with non-commercial interests 
(students...).

> My thinking is that languages need to get the kids interested and the 
> way to do this is game development.

I've no experience with writing games in Lazarus, but the graphics 
support of some platforms may be not sufficient for such projects. I'd 
be pleased to hear about different experience of other users ;-)

> 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.

IMO game support is kind of a decent (graphics) library, and I don't 
know which libraries are available in C++, Pascal or other languages.


> 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 
[...]
> I think it's a wonderful but imagine if the language that was introduced 
> was object pascal!

As mentioned above, it's a matter of according libraries. The Lazarus 
project is about the development system *for* writing librabries and 
applications, not about the implementation of such stuff.

Perhaps you can work together with your son on such a game-makers 
library for Lazarus?

DoDi