I just strongly disagree that there's much merit or reality to the overall concept people keep floating here that FPC's *actual *user base consists largely of a magical non-stop stream of 50+ year olds who have randomly decided out of the blue to "pick up Pascal again" and re-live the whimsical good old days.
Note that I am certainly *not* "young" myself as another poster suggested, and I have no issue with people who do take an interest in FPC for reasons roughly similar to what I described above. I do however have a huge issue with the perpetuation of the idea that FPC is *mostly* nothing more than a language for maintaining your mediocre Delphi 7 DBase apps in or for dragging out your dusty old DOS rig and tinkering around with for nostalgias sake. It is of course fully usable for those things, which is great! At the same time though it's a modern language with modern features that is extremely well suited for a variety of modern applications that *do not necessarily resemble *whatever arbitrary idealized vision or memory of Pascal that a given long-time user may or may not have, which as far as I'm concerned is also great! Basically I'm saying FPCs notable strength is its ability to seamlessly handle vastly different programming styles originating at totally different points in time and switch between them quite trivially. FPC is capable of much, much, much, more than "Database App Number Eighteen Million" and "Yet Another Reimplementation Of The Command-Line Snake Game I Originally Wrote 25 Years Ago", which I think an increasing number of people are discovering, some who may have used Pascal before, and some who might be younger and perhaps have not. As far as I'm concerned FPC is good for *everything, *and I'm just not a fan of insinuations to the contrary.
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