On 5 December 2013 18:48, Mark Morgan Lloyd <markmll.laza...@telemetry.co.uk> wrote: > Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote: > >>> If the guys who started lazarus, would have thought the same, there >>> would be no lazarus at all. If an OSS tool misses a certain feature, >>> then there is simply not enough interest, else somebody who needs it, >>> would implement it. Period. >> >> >> Look into Delphi forums, where references to Lazarus typically end up in >> user comments like: tried to ..., didn't work, dropped it as unusable. >> >> Most of my personal contacts react in the same way :-( > > > That might have been my experience a few years ago, particularly when > somebody was trying to use an "uncommon" platform like CE. But these days > the majority of Delphi users appear to be looking first for an alternative > to Object Pascal and second for an alternative to Embarcadero, and Lazarus > is not seriously considered because the underlying language is believed to > be obsolete. > > What we, as a community, have not managed to do is dispel the stigma > inflicted by early Pascal implementations which were too constrained to be > useful for "real" work, and to overcome faulty logic that says that since > ISO Pascal failed to standardise things like file I/O that implementations > quite simply could not access files. As a result I still have to deal with > rants about 1970s projects which failed because Pascal wasn't up to the job, > from people who freely admit that they've not tracked developments since > that era. > > So to summarise: it's not a deficiency of Lazarus or the development process > that makes promotion an uphill struggle. Rather, it's the long-standing > inability of the Pascal community to promote the language, to the extent > that these days even its members believe the misinformation spread about it.
Maybe we need a bit more information on the Lazarus home page about it. There is a "Why use it?" link that goes here: http://lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php?page=whyuse but it mainly talks about Lazarus with a only short mention about Free Pascal. Perhaps this should link to a wiki article with more information about the modern features of Free Pascal and answer common objections. -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus