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Lazarus IDE 3.0

forum.lazarus.freepascal.org

41–50 of 78 posts

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#41
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO there are two main reasons nowadays to check codegear's IDEs: you either have some huge Delphi codebase that you can't move anywhere else or you want C++ support with a full RAD IDE (i do not think there is anything as RAD-y as C++ Builder). QtCreator is a workable alternative though. Well, there is a third reason, you want to have some company to blame (and ask help from) when things break :-P

I think codegears is not their company name for several years now.

Embarcadero right?

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#42

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.

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

Maybe in Racket if you squint a bit?

https://github.com/Metaxal/MrEd-Designer/wiki

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#43

This wont be part of a Lazarus release any time soon (ok, it might be in 4.0 but i don't know when 4.0 will happen) as it is only on trunk, but recently i was fixing bugs for the Gtk1 backend. The neat bit is that Gtk1 is very small and while it isn't preinstalled anywhere nowadays (except Slackware) you can carry the .so as they are around 5-6MB or so. However it also supports static linking and after some quick hac…

God I only took a peek at the screenshots and I want that environment so bad. I miss it. I realise what it makes me sound like, sitting on my M2 32GB 1TB monster. Nostalgia hits you in the feels.

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#45

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?

Back in the day, there were a lot of great widgets for Delphi and a lot of small companies selling commercial widgets. That ecosystem made Delphi (and to some extent, C++ Builder), extremely popular.

Most of those vendors moves to .NET (usually C#) over the years, and eventually, to the web.

For comparison, Qt, which is awesome, has never had such an ecosystem.

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#46

This wont be part of a Lazarus release any time soon (ok, it might be in 4.0 but i don't know when 4.0 will happen) as it is only on trunk, but recently i was fixing bugs for the Gtk1 backend. The neat bit is that Gtk1 is very small and while it isn't preinstalled anywhere nowadays (except Slackware) you can carry the .so as they are around 5-6MB or so. However it also supports static linking and after some quick hac…

Would this GTK1 version work with Windows as well?

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#48
post #32

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

Java is also a more sophisticated basic and is commonly taught as an introductory language. I’d much rather be taught Pascal than Java. Probably 20 year old me would feel differently, but the 20 year old me was a much worse software engineer (actually, he was just a self taught programmer kid.)

> Java is also a more sophisticated basic

Is there some hidden context to these comments, like "we've all just inhaled industrial solvent fumes and then posted on Hacker News?"

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#49
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>"It's not wrong."

I think the post you are replying to got it exactly right. IMO your post got it all wrong.

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

Modern Delphi/FreePascal and the one created by Wirth are very different. I would not call it the same language. And what you "sure they wouldn't" is totally irrelevant.

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#50
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>"It's not wrong." I think the post you are replying to got it exactly right. IMO your post got it all wrong. >"I've met both Kurtz and Wirth and I'm sure they wouldn't have a problem with this." Modern Delphi/FreePascal and the one created by Wirth are very different. I would not call it the same language. And what you "sure they wouldn't" is totally irrelevant.

From the perspective of the learner, the actual cognitive work to get to mastery is of a similar order of magnitude and similar nature. The feature crossover is probably 80-90% depending on how you choose to enumerate them.

The question was about that, specifically, not about the history, not about the nuanced details of who created it, but about how hard it was to pick up.

Specifically "Any recommendations on how to learn it"

It's not in the class of R, FORTH, assembly or Haskell. It's not like Erlang. It's as conceptually approachable as Basic and historically was taught after Basic to tens of millions of people over the course of two decades, in that order.

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