[Lazarus] The future of desktop

[Danny Weldon]

On 5 December 2013 18:48, Mark Morgan Lloyd
<markMLl.lazarus at telemetry.co.uk> wrote:
> 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.

Maybe we need a bit more information on the Lazarus home page about it.

There is a "Why use it?" link that goes here:
  http://lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php?page=whyuse
but it mainly talks about Lazarus with a only short mention about
Free Pascal.

Perhaps this should link to a wiki article with more information about
the modern features of Free Pascal and answer common objections.