Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

Given more thoughts, I am fairly conflicted/confused about web apps vs Python :)

Web apps, as you've said, are pretty straightforward, minimal setup, extremely easy to relate to. I guess many folks who aren't familiar with coding have an idea for web site or two. That makes it a great motivator, no doubt. If a friend asked where to start, I'd probably point to this direction. HTML5 games is a pretty good choice too, and Phaser is a neat framework to start with.

However, there are a few problems with this approach.

First, most of the development/studying would be more about the details of browsers/jQuery/javascript itself. How to get the content of this input, how to attach this event, etc. The problem is that it doesn't do much to teach the mindset of programming. You know, when to apply for loop, when while loop, etc.

The other problem is that web dev is moving much much faster than most of the education systems in the world. In 2010, you probably would have taught about jQuery. In 2015, you probably would use vanilla JS as it's good enough, modern browsers are following the standards well enough. And then you have all the html5 elements (video, etc), css3 properties which are fairly important nowadays but didn't exist 5 years ago (or the browser support was poor).

So, web dev might work quite well for motivated individuals and equally motivated teachers but probably less so for mainstream education (i.e. highschools).

I've never worked with Pascal, and I've been looking for an alternative to C that solves some of the issues I'm having without sacrificing too many of its advantages. Since fpc is available for armv6, I am wondering if someone could give me advice on whether moving this project to Pascal would be beneficial, especially compared to the following points:

- A proper module system, without having to keep .h and .c files in sync when the interfaces aren't stable yet. I am currently using makeheaders to make things less annoying for me.

- Compiler warnings, cppcheck and scan-build offer me great feedback. Emacs integration of these tools is priceless.

- The ability to do things like recv() into the middle of a buffer. That is just too efficient to let go of. I think this is something many people overlook when comparing C to other programming languages, many times you can turn O(2n) into O(n) by taking advantage of this. Not theoretically different, but in practice it can pay off.

- Emacs integration and support. Nice to have would be support for auto-completion, static analysis, etc...

- Documentation. Man 2, 3 and 3p are priceless. Emacs man integration is great.

- Number types that are exactly the same across architectures. eg, I've had issues because off_t was ulong on one machine and ulonglong on the other.

- Memory management, error handling and everything you need to do that has nothing to do with the task at hand. It gets old quickly.

- Optionally high-level, I am comfortable working with pointers and addressing memory directly, but sometimes I look for elegance where I know performance is not going to be affected too much (ie, the trade-off is acceptable). This also means that when I'm working with higher-level constructs, I'd like to have easy access to the inner workings so that I can make such a judgement myself (either through documentation or other means).

- I don't care too much about compilation speed.

- Easy semantics and simplicity of things. I really don't think I can put that into words, it's better understood through experience. But this is one of the biggest reasons I stick with C rather than C++ or Rust.

- The availability of a widely approved guide that doesn't go into the very basics of programming to explain the language (maybe some sort of Pascal for C people kind of thing).

- There are probably a few more points I could talk about but can't think of right now. I could write them down some time later if anyone is interested.

Thank you in advance, I would really appreciate if anybody can help me with these points, I'm looking for new adventures :)

On the other hand Python can be installed with one binary on Macs, Windows, and Linux with 300 packages and an IDE[1] and they'll be able to use it with the Excel spreadsheets down the road which they'll inevitably have to deal with if they're the average white-collar office worker. (See: http://xlwings.org/ and say goodbye to VBA). The large majority of people will actually use Excel on a regular basis and if their job involves reconciling a lot of semi-structured data, as it frequently occurs with my friends in the social sciences or other non-CS fields, they'll largely benefit from Python.

Not only that but after having a core Python knowledge, with the same Anaconda package, you'll be able to make your own QT-native crossplatform full GUI binaries with an 'import PySide' or write your own 'web apps' with equal ease.

If your goal is to maximize the performance of your students in international competitive programming competitions, then you should be teaching them out of Competitive Programming and Steve Skeina's book so they recognize what category the problem falls into (it's usually one of 5 or 6), along with C++ plus the standard C++ libraries that everyone uses that loads in GMP, makes matrix manipulation easy, etc.

If your goal is to cater to the guys to teach fundamentals to those who are going to matriculate into the CS uni path, then both are wrong and you should be teaching out of something like the SICP from the 'top down' and something like ML from the 'bottom up'.

[1] https://www.continuum.io/downloads if you don't like Anaconda, there are a boatload of competitors like https://python-xy.github.io/ that come with Spyder, which I think we both will agree offers a better development experience than Tampermonkey.

Microsoft should fix the "bug" that its operating system is missing interpreters for Perl, Python, etc... (Oddly enough, this list also includes javascript!)