[Lazarus] The future of desktop

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:

>> If the guys who started lazarus, would have thought the same, there
>> would be no lazarus at all. If an OSS tool misses a certain feature,
>> then there is simply not enough interest, else somebody who needs it,
>> would implement it. Period.
> 
> Look into Delphi forums, where references to Lazarus typically end up in 
> user comments like: tried to ..., didn't work, dropped it as unusable.
> 
> Most of my personal contacts react in the same way :-(

That might have been my experience a few years ago, particularly when 
somebody was trying to use an "uncommon" platform like CE. But these 
days the majority of Delphi users appear to be looking first for an 
alternative to Object Pascal and second for an alternative to 
Embarcadero, and Lazarus is not seriously considered because the 
underlying language is believed to be obsolete.

What we, as a community, have not managed to do is dispel the stigma 
inflicted by early Pascal implementations which were too constrained to 
be useful for "real" work, and to overcome faulty logic that says that 
since ISO Pascal failed to standardise things like file I/O that 
implementations quite simply could not access files. As a result I still 
have to deal with rants about 1970s projects which failed because Pascal 
wasn't up to the job, from people who freely admit that they've not 
tracked developments since that era.

So to summarise: it's not a deficiency of Lazarus or the development 
process that makes promotion an uphill struggle. Rather, it's the 
long-standing inability of the Pascal community to promote the language, 
to the extent that these days even its members believe the 
misinformation spread about it.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]