FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation • Hacker News Board

Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation

#21

Post by vram22 » Wed, Jul 06, 2016, 7:57 PM UTC

analognoise wrote: post #15

I'll donate when it all gets setup. I really like Pascal. Jeff Duntemann is writing new intro books and releasing then under a Creative Commons license iirc. It's a great language and a killer environment.

>Jeff Duntemann is writing new intro books and releasing then under a Creative Commons license iirc.

I remember his name as a computer book author from older PC days and mags/books, but have forgotten what he used to write about. Did he write about C or Pascal, say Turbo Pascal, earlier too? Just saw his site (http://www.duntemann.com/) and it seems to show only assembly language books (on a quick look). Not that it matters, of course he could write books on Pascal now, but just wondering whethere he wrote any Pascal books before.

>It's a great language and a killer environment.

Agreed. Was a Turbo Pascal user for some years, great language and lightning fast dev env. Done smaller amounts of Delphi work too, and loved it. Too bad about the corp. issues that have happened, and about no current low-cost edition. They discontinued Turbo Delphi Explorer, or rather the Turbo Explorer series (existed in around 2006) which included Turbo C++ Explorer too, IIRC. And the TD Explorer at the time was available in two versions, for Win 32 and .NET.

Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation

#22

Post by dmix » Wed, Jul 06, 2016, 7:59 PM UTC

ics wrote: post #16

dmix wrote: post #8

I wish they chose a better name than "Free Pascal". It makes it sound like a lower-quality version. After that recent Object Pascal guide was on HN [1] I've been meaning to try the language out. It looks like it might be a nice alternative to using Ruby on some small side projects where I need a quick OO language to work with. I've grown attached to static types so it looks like it might be a good option. My only con…

You might also be interested in Nim, see for example: http://goran.krampe.se/2014/10/29/nim-and-oo/ (Static types, basic OO, syntax, fast compilation)

Thanks for the heads up. Will do.

Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation

#23

Post by vram22 » Wed, Jul 06, 2016, 8:00 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #12

trentmb wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or that you have to drop $1,405.00 [0] to get a 'professional' environment. [0] https://www.embarcadero.com/app-development-tools-store/delp...

And no Linux support (yet).

Yes, I had read maybe around a year ago on their site that Embarcadero had plans to bring out a Delphi version with Linux support. Not sure what happened to that, and also now that they have been bought by Idera (which I only saw from the recent thread here about Modern Object Pascal).

Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation

#24

Post by teraflop » Wed, Jul 06, 2016, 8:10 PM UTC

vram22 wrote: post #21

analognoise wrote: post #15

I'll donate when it all gets setup. I really like Pascal. Jeff Duntemann is writing new intro books and releasing then under a Creative Commons license iirc. It's a great language and a killer environment.

>Jeff Duntemann is writing new intro books and releasing then under a Creative Commons license iirc. I remember his name as a computer book author from older PC days and mags/books, but have forgotten what he used to write about. Did he write about C or Pascal, say Turbo Pascal, earlier too? Just saw his site ( http://www.duntemann.com/ ) and it seems to show only assembly language books (on a quick look). Not that i…

Yep, Duntemann is the author of Complete Turbo Pascal from the 80's.

It's a bit of a door-stopper, but it was one of the first programming books I ever read as a kid, and I have vague memories of it being a great introduction to software design in general.

Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation

#25

Post by mythz » Wed, Jul 06, 2016, 8:11 PM UTC

Mad props for all the different OS's and UI toolkit's that their Lazarus IDE runs under:

http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Screenshots

Rare to see a Native UI targeting so many platforms.

Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation

#26

Post by ivoras » Wed, Jul 06, 2016, 8:21 PM UTC

mythz wrote: post #25

Mad props for all the different OS's and UI toolkit's that their Lazarus IDE runs under: http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Screenshots Rare to see a Native UI targeting so many platforms.

Believe it or not, Lazarus is probably the single most-cross-platform-compatible GUI builder for native apps that exists, anywhere.

Neither Java, nor Qt nor anything else come even close. And the apps are native!

As for the "I don't like Pascal because Pascal is ugly" crowd: it's only different, and it's almost by chance (i.e. reasons external to the language itself) that most of today's production languages have used C for their syntax template; if they've used Pascal, then the C syntax would be the "ugly" one.

Microsoft has basically poached developers working on Delphi to develop the first versions of C# and it showed both in the design of the language (properties, the type system) and the early IDE.

Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation

#27

Post by hugh4life » Wed, Jul 06, 2016, 8:37 PM UTC

ivoras wrote: post #26

mythz wrote: post #25

Mad props for all the different OS's and UI toolkit's that their Lazarus IDE runs under: http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Screenshots Rare to see a Native UI targeting so many platforms.

Believe it or not, Lazarus is probably the single most-cross-platform-compatible GUI builder for native apps that exists, anywhere. Neither Java, nor Qt nor anything else come even close. And the apps are native! As for the "I don't like Pascal because Pascal is ugly" crowd: it's only different, and it's almost by chance (i.e. reasons external to the language itself) that most of today's production languages have use…

"Believe it or not, Lazarus is probably the single most-cross-platform-compatible GUI builder for native apps that exists, anywhere."

Except they build on GTK 2, Qt 4, and Carbon on OSX. I haven't used it, but the whole LCL architecture seems absurd to me as there's no way that a project like theirs can keep things up to date.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/LCLArchi...

Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation

#28

Post by DanBC » Wed, Jul 06, 2016, 8:43 PM UTC

systems wrote: post #2

is this new

More importantly: "is this interesting". (Yes, it is.)

Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation

#29

Post by trentmb » Wed, Jul 06, 2016, 8:45 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #14

trentmb wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or that you have to drop $1,405.00 [0] to get a 'professional' environment. [0] https://www.embarcadero.com/app-development-tools-store/delp...

That's the problem. You can't sell programming tools any more. Everyone expects them to be free. Walter Bright, the designer of D and one of the first good C++, is on here, and has mentioned that before. So programming tools come from some source that has an agenda. Oracle. Microsoft. Google. Even Mozilla.

I don't mind paying for my tools. I have a ST2 license, and will be buying an ST3 upgrade license when it's time.

It's just that $1.5k is hard to justify for a single language environment/compiler. VS2015 Pro is $499, while a yearly Pro/MSDN subscriptions is $1,199/year.

Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation

#30

Post by boznz » Wed, Jul 06, 2016, 8:56 PM UTC

" there are still many things need to be fixed and enhanced on both projects"

I can think of a couple of minor improvements, but overall for Windows and Linux desktop and database development in Lazarus (which is all I do) I have not really seen anything that needs much in the way of fixing and the code it is producing is pretty efficient and has been in my clients production systems for over 12 months now.

Keep up the great work chaps :-)