On Sun, 19 Jul 2015, Den wrote:
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?
Why do you say there is no support ?
There is. Mailing lists, forums, and even a company that offers paid support.
*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/)
What stops you from starting such an effort ?
You can start e.g. by adding the tuples idea which was discussed on the mailing list several years ago.
I have 28 years of Pascal experience which is completely at your disposal...
Michael.
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