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Lazarus IDE 3.0

forum.lazarus.freepascal.org

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Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#21

Post by regularfry »

nurettin wrote: post #16
satvikpendem wrote: post #11

I keep hearing about Pascal and Delphi, especially on HN, what is it and why is it special or talked about so much? I understand it's an older programming language but not why it's so loved. Any recommendations on how to learn it and is Lazarus a good option for the IDE or does VSCode suffice?

Delphi and Lazarus are a continuation of the beloved gui-first idiom where you are greeted by an IDE capable of running code at design-time. That means you can add an sql connection component, create a query, connect it to a data source, connect the data source to a grid and fill it right there while designing your form to see how the result will look like when you run it. The second reason to use it is: it builds fo…

It's funny how that sort of immediacy is what people like about lisps, but to my knowledge there is nothing like the RAD interface Lazarus and Delphi have in the open source lisp world.

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#22

Post by tonyg »

cstross wrote: post #19
kristopolous wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not hard to learn. It was often taught as a "first language" the place that I guess Python occupies today. Essentially a more sophisticated BASIC

Essentially a more sophisticated BASIC Absolutely wrong. PASCAL was invented by Professor Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich specifically for teaching structured programming, circa 1970 (year of first release). It's a descendant of ALGOL (1960), which was pretty much the first structured programming language and introduced functions that could be recursively invoked -- ALGOL is the ancestor of C and PL/I as well as Pascal a…

(Algol 60 was also an important influence on Scheme! So is Scheme a lisp or an algol? Yes.)

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#23

Post by deathtrader666 »

regularfry wrote: post #21
nurettin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delphi and Lazarus are a continuation of the beloved gui-first idiom where you are greeted by an IDE capable of running code at design-time. That means you can add an sql connection component, create a query, connect it to a data source, connect the data source to a grid and fill it right there while designing your form to see how the result will look like when you run it. The second reason to use it is: it builds fo…

It's funny how that sort of immediacy is what people like about lisps, but to my knowledge there is nothing like the RAD interface Lazarus and Delphi have in the open source lisp world.

Would be cool to have a Lisp backend with a Pascal GUI

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#24

Post by MobiusHorizons »

satvikpendem wrote: post #11

I keep hearing about Pascal and Delphi, especially on HN, what is it and why is it special or talked about so much? I understand it's an older programming language but not why it's so loved. Any recommendations on how to learn it and is Lazarus a good option for the IDE or does VSCode suffice?

For many people it was the first language they learned, which I think explains most of it. But the tooling was also very fast from a latency perspective, even on the slow hardware of the time, which tends to make for magical memorable experiences.

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#25

Post by kristopolous »

cstross wrote: post #19
kristopolous wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not hard to learn. It was often taught as a "first language" the place that I guess Python occupies today. Essentially a more sophisticated BASIC

Essentially a more sophisticated BASIC Absolutely wrong. PASCAL was invented by Professor Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich specifically for teaching structured programming, circa 1970 (year of first release). It's a descendant of ALGOL (1960), which was pretty much the first structured programming language and introduced functions that could be recursively invoked -- ALGOL is the ancestor of C and PL/I as well as Pascal a…

It's not wrong.

I stand by exactly what I said.

In practice, it was taught as an introduction to programming.

For a decade or two, children learned Basic and highschool/JC aged kids learned Pascal.

Of course they aren't the same thing. It'd be like saying kids ride tricycles and then bicycles and clapping back about penny farthings, velocipedes and dandy horses while tricycles started as a wheelchair device.

Give me a break. The point was Pascal is accessible and easy to learn.

I've met both Kurtz and Wirth and I'm sure they wouldn't have a problem with this.

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#26

Post by sixthDot »

badsectoracula wrote: post #15
satvikpendem wrote: post #11

I keep hearing about Pascal and Delphi, especially on HN, what is it and why is it special or talked about so much? I understand it's an older programming language but not why it's so loved. Any recommendations on how to learn it and is Lazarus a good option for the IDE or does VSCode suffice?

I've written a lot of Object Pascal (meaning the Delphi dialect of Pascal, not the older Apple dialect) over the years and... i don't think there is anything special about it :-P. It has a bunch of neat features (and a bunch of not so neat pitfalls) but really IMO the three main reasons to use it is that: 1. It has decent backwards compatibility (code i wrote even 20 years ago compiles either out of the box or with v…

But linking is slow, plus also only possible using ld.bfd. This causes problems here as I default to gold... For now; each time you start using or close lazarus you have to remind to change ld target.

Otherwise compilation is indeed fast because it uses a system of cache (just like delphi *.dcu system) plus it has modules. On top of that we can add... context-free grammar that's fast to parse, no _insane_ preprocessing (but still some, $ifdef and co).

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#27

Post by spamatica »

MobiusHorizons wrote: post #24
satvikpendem wrote: post #11

I keep hearing about Pascal and Delphi, especially on HN, what is it and why is it special or talked about so much? I understand it's an older programming language but not why it's so loved. Any recommendations on how to learn it and is Lazarus a good option for the IDE or does VSCode suffice?

For many people it was the first language they learned, which I think explains most of it. But the tooling was also very fast from a latency perspective, even on the slow hardware of the time, which tends to make for magical memorable experiences.

And also incredibly small.

Turbo Pascal 2.0 had an IDE with compiler and debugger in a binary less than 60kb (if the info I found googling is true). Of course nowhere near the capabilities of modern environments but state of the art at the time.

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#28

Post by Barrin92 »

regularfry wrote: post #21
nurettin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delphi and Lazarus are a continuation of the beloved gui-first idiom where you are greeted by an IDE capable of running code at design-time. That means you can add an sql connection component, create a query, connect it to a data source, connect the data source to a grid and fill it right there while designing your form to see how the result will look like when you run it. The second reason to use it is: it builds fo…

It's funny how that sort of immediacy is what people like about lisps, but to my knowledge there is nothing like the RAD interface Lazarus and Delphi have in the open source lisp world.

> there is nothing like the RAD interface Lazarus and Delphi have in the open source lisp world.

The key phrase there is 'open source' I believe, because tools like Lazarus come out of a pretty distinct Borland / Windows culture of making bespoke usually paid graphical development tools. Lisps have a lot of their roots in the academic and Unix culture with a lot of folks seemingly allergic to GUIs to this day. There's an interesting interview with Carmack from a year or two ago talking about this.

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#29

Post by askvictor »

satvikpendem wrote: post #11

I keep hearing about Pascal and Delphi, especially on HN, what is it and why is it special or talked about so much? I understand it's an older programming language but not why it's so loved. Any recommendations on how to learn it and is Lazarus a good option for the IDE or does VSCode suffice?

Programming in Delphi was fun and easy. It's probably because things were overall simpler then, but we seem to hold on to the idea that it was the tool. And maybe it was, I haven't tried Delphi in a while.

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#30

Post by badsectoracula »

sixthDot wrote: post #26
badsectoracula wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've written a lot of Object Pascal (meaning the Delphi dialect of Pascal, not the older Apple dialect) over the years and... i don't think there is anything special about it :-P. It has a bunch of neat features (and a bunch of not so neat pitfalls) but really IMO the three main reasons to use it is that: 1. It has decent backwards compatibility (code i wrote even 20 years ago compiles either out of the box or with v…

But linking is slow, plus also only possible using ld.bfd. This causes problems here as I default to gold... For now; each time you start using or close lazarus you have to remind to change ld target. Otherwise compilation is indeed fast because it uses a system of cache (just like delphi *.dcu system) plus it has modules. On top of that we can add... context-free grammar that's fast to parse, no _insane_ preprocessi…

There are preprocessor macros though you need to explicitly enable them and they don't support parameters (there are workarounds but in practice they're not really needed). FWIW i never had to use them so far, the most i needed from the preprocessor was DEFINE/IFDEF/ENDIF/etc.
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