On Sat, 3 Jul 2010, jjb wrote:
I am an interested observer of Lazarus but I know very little about it. I am interested partly because Pascal was the first language I ever used (it formed a very small part of a non-CS degree.) I understand that this is an open source project so I guess that those who develop it do so because they love it. Are these people users of Lazarus in their day jobs or is Lazarus just a hobby that they don't ever expect to use professionally?
I use it in my job as well.
I only found Lazarus by accident it seems to have a much lower profile than other open source stuff (eg python, php, java etc). Is there a reason for this?
Object Pascal is not regarded as a 'modern' language, but this is an uninformed view.
Where in the world is Lazarus popular/not so popular. I see that there is a german language textbook that may be translated to english sometime.
I think that it is safe to assume that it is more popular in Europe and in South America. North america is more given to hype C-style languages as Python, Ruby, Java(Script). I am not sure about the situation in the middle/far east.
The level of skill in this mail group seems quite high. Do people come to Lazarus as already skilled programmers in other languages as I don't see many newbies asking simple questions.
I think that it's more easy to reach a high level in Object Pascal, because it is an easy language. On the other hand, most Pascal programmers program pascal since a long time, and with age comes experience...
Or is it the case that people here are older on average and cut their teeth when Pascal was more popular? I guess I'm asking in a roundabout way if this community is growing.
My guess would be: yes. Mailing list traffic increases, website traffic too.
I have read in Delphi discussions many times people talking about how to make the language more popular. One of the issues always brought up is price. Lazarus doesn't have this problem so I wonder if price is a factor in Delphi's relative unpopularity.
No. The language is. See the answer to where the language is popular.
My thinking is that languages need to get the kids interested and the way to do this is game development. I believe that C++ is the language of the serious game developers. I also believe that object pascal provides almost the same power as C++ but without a lot of the pain. Correct me if I am wrong as I don't know any of this from experience only from reading.
I would say that this is a correct impression. Object pascal offers all of the benefits of C++ (OO programming, Compiled) and none of the downsides: C inheritance, header/source split, multiple inheritance, strange constructors etc.
I recently bought my 9 year old son this book The Game Maker's Apprentice<http://www.amazon.com/Game-Makers-Apprentice-Development-Beginners/dp/1590596153/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278161293&sr=8-1> and he is working his way through it at the moment. It comes with software enabling users to easily create 2D games with all the bells and whistles (lives, health, levels, explosions) and supplies lots of resources (images and sounds) for sprites etc. For most of the book users learn to create games by instancing built-in objects and altering their attributes and behaviour. Only later in the book is coding introduced to enable users to extend beyond what's provided. I think it's a wonderful but imagine if the language that was introduced was object pascal!
Indeed, we can currently only imagine... Michael. -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
