Hi all,
There's been recent talk about adding a new dialect and such, and I
just wanna weigh in that I don't think it's a very good call to split
Free Pascal even more.. I believe Free Pascal had such potential.. And
the reason I mention 'had' is the fact that makes Free Pascal 'strong'
also makes it it's biggest weakness and downfall; The fact that there is
no direction and lead, and everyone can add whatever they want. The
difference between Free Pascal and successful big languages are
*leadership*, *roadmap*, *community*, *support*. Now I know the usuals
will start immediately thinking 'yes but it's all volunteer, we don't
have the man power' .. Why is many other languages believed to be more
popular?
*Standards**.*
If we had a group of people that designed standards (/a group
document??/), people like me can see the new standard and say 'oh, nice
I like that feature, I'm gonna implement it'. Let's say someone else
makes a completely LLVM compiler based on that standard? So what if it's
not one program, at least Pascal would 'survive'. Just like ECMAScript,
C++, PHP, most languages now have a 'standards' document behind it.
That's their *roadmap*. Their *leadership*. Design it and the
*community* will show *support*. I know I would actually feel like
working towards it, because then I know when they are approved I'm not
wasting my time creating features and such, just to have them rejected
and never implemented. ;)
I would personally love to add to such standards, and we can add some of
the collective wisdom of ours. :) (/I have 22+ years of experience with
Pascal, and I'm sure Florian, Sven, Marco, and Jonas all have similar if
not much more; and would be excellent at adding to the standard/)
- Dennis Fehr
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