[Lazarus] Why the Java became so strong?

[Frank Church]

On 25 February 2012 13:52, Marco van de Voort <marcov at stack.nl> wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 02:55:17PM -0200, Everton Vieira wrote:
>
> > How to improve things:
> > - Better container lib.
> > - Better documentation.
> > - Easier installation.
> > - Publicity! This would be the most important now. The other parts are
> in a decently good condition.
> >  Successful projects have a public relations side-project, advertising
> themselves somehow. Product releases are one way to get free advertising.
> Thus it is very bad for publicity that Lazarus has releases so seldom. A
> product release is always mentioned in some programming site, read by
> potential users. Without releases this looks like a dead project.
>
>   - get billion dollar investments of big IT companies.  Java did too :-)
>
>
> --
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>

This the second time I have got involved in this kind of discussion today!!

There are so many points here is not possible to discuss them all.

Many Pascal programmers are well versed in the language, and the associated
tools, having began using it even before the Turbo Pascal era. let alone
the Dephi/Object Pascal period. They are quite fine working as they are and
can get to speed quickly. Newcomers and even some of old timers are the
ones who ask themselves "If I am starting a new project, is Pascal the
right one? Of course not!" Newcomers problem will be familiarity with the
language, old timers issues will be the libraries and associated tools.

In relation to Eclipse above, The minimum 2Gb or even 4Gb or RAM needed to
run Eclipse is not much these days. I have used Eclipse with languages I am
not familiar with and the syntax highlighting kicks in shows me syntax
errors and missing libraries straight away. With Pascal I have to
repeatedly compile to track them down. Try that with an free contemporary
Pascal IDE.

Collaborative tools lag behind. Enough has been said about the Git vs
Subversion issue. As for moving to a hosted service such a Github, Jira,
Assembla etc, the topic has not even come up. It is okay if existing tools
are fine but how many young people what to work with anything other than
Github, Git, Mercurial etc.

How about the reluctance to put documentation in library code? The policy
with fpdoc is to create documentation separately from code. The problem is
who has time for that. If documentation goes into the code it is better as
it forces you to think clearly about what your are doing as you are doing
that knowing that others depend on it, especially if there is a strict
community code of ensuring that docs in the code are always correct and up
to date, and that if they are not accurate they should be removed
altogether. I am developing a FreePascal Lazarus program now, owing to my
familiarity with Delphi, but at the same time I am keenly aware that in
domains I am unfamiliar with I would probably better using Java, Python
because the tools and libraries would be much better.

Mind you I am not denigrating Pascal in anyway, but it would be more a
labour of love than one of economic utility, when economic utility would be
the better driver.


PS. Whatever you do store it in a repository and keep good notes on it. You
might forget it sooner than you think


-- 
Frank Church

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