[Lazarus] Teaching Pascal at College

Lars noreply at z505.com
Fri Oct 21 11:18:07 CEST 2016


>  Both points are important,
> being popular is also important, network effect is important. More users
> means more libraries, more beta testers, more information, more tools. So,
> better frameworks.


Popular isn't always good. Look at perl's Cpan, or heck even java.
Basically if you have a bunch of monkeys typing on typewriters it does not
necessarily mean you are going to get a good book written by monkeys even
if there are 1,000,000 working on it in the same room.

Ruby Gems same thing.  All this popular stuff doesn't necessarily mean
high quality code.

Take something utterly unpopular like Oberon, and you see super high
quality code. Or OpenBSD that virtually no one uses yet it is rock solid
code compared to some of the other garbage out there.

Of course I don't want to reiterate what Paul Graham has said, he wrote an
article about "popular" and it's issues.

>
> Don't underestimate the "popular factor".
>

Certainly. But popular is also analogous to monkeys on typewriters pumping
out quantity, but not quality.

Don't mean to call Ruby or Perl or Java programmers monkeys, but some of
the stuff I've seen come out of that end appears to be of such.

Cpan, for example, is a repository for all perl code. And very popular it
was during the internet days when Perl was the duct tape of the internet.
The fact that they called it "duct tape" should be the first clue...


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