Maybe that's why in the "10 programming languages you should learn right now" (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2016415,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594) does not appear Pascal but appears the quite old C with a bunch of relatively new languages. In the list appears even VB.Net!!
And the first point in the "5 easy ways to be a better developer post" (http://steve.jessica-and-steve.com/articles/2006/09/13/5-easy-ways-to-be-a-better-developer) is "Learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails". Why? "...because Ruby and RoR are fantastic examples of how to write clean, easy to maintain, functional code". Pascal used to be known for similar reasons, why not nowadays?
But not everything is lost. Some people seem to be wanting to take advantage from this situation. Chrome (http://www.chromesville.com/), for example, is a very interesting alternative to Delphi, IMHO. Of course, free Pascal / lazarus / msegui are interesting too, but are very quiet projects.
To be really competitive with other languages Pascal needs more people programming with the language, that brings more attention to the core projects (compilers, IDEs, libraries, etc.) and results in faster development that makes more people to program in Pascal and so on. But for doing that we need to be more noisy.
The only movement I've seen recently to refresh Pascal image is the new freepascal web site's design (very needed, by the way). In order to get the attention we need to be a bit more aggressive. Aggressive marketing for both Pascal language and freepascal / lazarus projects.
That's what I think is needed to do (not an exhaustive or priority ordered list):
Stop calling Pascal Pascal (arguable). Maybe Object Pascal is better.
Write more about Object Pascal (OP). Blog posts, wiki articles... I've not seen a good C++ to Object Pascal guide, for example. Java to OP neither. I've seen in the other way, though.
Encourage more open source projects in OP.
Write / update bindings for many popular libraries.
Write a good linker for free Pascal. It is known that smart linking projects with classes can be painful.
What about extensions in free Pascal to support .Net / Mono, like chrome? Extensions to support partial classes, closures, and other modern programming paradigms could be welcome too.
Try to standardize syntax / behavior. I think this is one of the keys to C/C++ success. Delphi, freepascal and chrome, just to mention a few, have many differences.
I know that some of these points need more people involved in the project, but that's the point. I also know that this is not the first marketing related article mailed, it's just my 2 cents.
Juan
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