[Lazarus] Who is using Object Pascal in production?

[Alexander Klenin]

On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 11:26 PM, Marcos Douglas B. Santos via Lazarus
<lazarus at lists.lazarus-ide.org> wrote:
> I would like to propose a discussion about "What is the relevance of
> Object Pascal nowadays".
> I don't want waste your time. I just want to know if we are growing
> and being more relevant or not.

For many years I have advocated first Delphi, then FreePascal/Lazarus
as a teaching tool for both high school and introductory university.
Historically, Delphi/Lazarus offered superior IDE experience,
while the language itself was both beginner-friendly and powerful when
learned completely.

Sadly, while on IDE front other IDEs are catching up
(for example, form designers in both Visual Studio 2017 and latest Qt
are almost as good, and in some aspects better),
the language continues to lag behind so much that even 8th graders are starting
to complain about missing features.
Older teachers who prefer Pascal syntax moved to PascalABC,
which displaced perhaps 90% of FPC usage in Russian high schools.

Finally, FPC became almost completely unsuitable for competitive programming,
which drives away influential part of next programmers generation.
At the last year International Olympiad in Informatics I have given a
passionate speech
against excluding Free Pascal from a list of available languages,
and succeeded in postponing that decision for a few years,
but the writing is still on the wall.

So reluctantly I started to phase out FPC/Lazarus in my work
in favor of PascalABC/Python for high school and С++/C# for university.
For the record, C# is the only language in that list that I like.

-- 
Alexander S. Klenin