[Lazarus] Teaching Pascal at College

[Erwin van den Bosch]

Although I use Free Pascal/Lazarus a lot (because we have a lot of 
existing pascal code) I think C++ and some GUI framework like QT might 
be a better option. C/C++ is the number one used programming language. 
C/C++ code is much more portable to other systems. There are more 
compilers. QT has a very nice IDE (QT Creator) and is available for 
Windows, Mac and Linux. Nobody is using Pascal these days. So why learn it?

I'm not a big fan of the RAD development way any more. (I was years 
ago). The problem is that you should separate your business logic and 
the GUI. With Delphi like RAD it's very difficult to do that. (but it is 
possible) Everything is coded in events and connected to database aware 
GUI controls. (In the case of a database application)
Another problem with the RAD way is that a lot is stored in forms (.lfm 
files) and it's difficult to see/notice changes to those files. They can 
be very big and it's difficult to see if some control is missing, for 
example, an event or so. The Lazarus IDE does frequently change the 
properties of controls on the form. For example the width and the height 
properties frequently change with no reason as it seems. As specially 
when you do development on both Windows and Linux. That makes tracking 
code changes (and so potential new bugs) not very easy.

Regards,
     Erwin

Op 12-10-2016 om 20:10 schreef Adrian De Armas via Lazarus:
> Hello everyone,
> I am a professor of "introduction to programming". Currently we are 
> working with matlab and c.
>
> Today I had a meeting about doing the module more interesting to the 
> students. Currently we teach algorithms making console applications 
> and usually I receive questions like "Why don't we do something more 
> modern?".
>
> I recommended that we should use Pascal in General and Lazarus in 
> particular to teach how to create rich GUI Applications and to my 
> surprise the idea was well recieved. Now I have to make suggestions 
> about how to prepare the module starting from zero. Students do not 
> know how to program and I need to include subjects as: variable 
> declaration, operations, if, while, for, functions and procedure, 
> arrays and multidimensional arrays.
>
> I would love to know what you think about making the transition from 
> console to GUI.
> This is an exciting opportunity I'd love to make it right.
>
> Regards
>
>

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