[Lazarus] Some information please

Michael Van Canneyt michael at freepascal.org
Sat Jul 3 17:10:53 CEST 2010



On Sat, 3 Jul 2010, jjb wrote:

> 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 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?

I use it in my job as well.

> 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?

Object Pascal is not regarded as a 'modern' language, but this is an
uninformed view.

> 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 think that it is safe to assume that it is more popular in Europe and in
South America. North america is more given to hype C-style languages as Python,
Ruby, Java(Script). I am not sure about the situation in the middle/far
east.

> 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.

I think that it's more easy to reach a high level in Object Pascal, because
it is an easy language. On the other hand, most Pascal programmers program
pascal since a long time, and with age comes experience...

> Or is it the case that people here are older on average and cut their teeth
> when Pascal was more popular?
> I guess I'm asking in a roundabout way if this community is growing.

My guess would be: yes. Mailing list traffic increases, website traffic too.

> 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.

No. The language is. See the answer to where the language is popular.

>
> 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 would say that this is a correct impression. Object pascal offers all of
the benefits of C++ (OO programming, Compiled) and none of the
downsides: C inheritance, header/source split, multiple inheritance, strange
constructors etc.

> 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.
> 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!

Indeed, we can currently only imagine...

Michael.




More information about the Lazarus mailing list