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It's a nice thought, but Pascal's age and its verbose (but highly readable) syntax means that many programmers will never give it more than a passing glance (re

It's a nice thought, but Pascal's age and its verbose (but highly readable) syntax means that many programmers will never give it more than a passing glance (regardless of the modern features it has to offer).

chappi42 10y ago
Age and verbosity has imho no influence. I'd rather say the following points are important: - the project is not on github, issue tracker looks like from 2 centuries ago, ditto website, several different forum (maillists) instead of e.g. one discourse instance for the 'whole pascal project' - the granularity of the code libraries is difficult (compiler, rtl, component sets (ui and non-ui), tools, lazarus, web, ...). You cannot just clone one of these parts and work on it - no (fully supported) Cocoa support and thus the Mac platform is a bit handicapped (32bit Carbon), too many obscure legacy platforms, too many options, too complicated - no modern defacto standards, e.g. md/rst formatted docu, different syntaxes/dialects (fpc, delphi, mse, oxygene, smartpascal, etc...) - iirc license situation is a bit 'chaotic' (some LGPL 2.1 (with exception), some GPL 2 (3?), some MPL 1.1/2, more?) and in comparision to newer languages, e.g. go/rust (MIT, APL) the licenses are more (copyleft) restrictive. I like that more modern environments dropped ideological for pragmatic - afaik no big company/organization invests money into the pascal ecosystem (if this were the case, probably most of the points above would be different) This is just to say why I think it is not more popular, I very much appreciate the project/work, it's great!
- samuell 10y ago
  The forums (and I think wiki) etc are astonishingly up-to-date though in my experience, and I have mostly got a useful answer in the forum within an hour or so, so I would say, don't judge the book by the cover :)
  - chappi42 10y ago
    I agree. Nevertheless in the world of today the cover is important too :) I think...

chappi42 10y ago

Age and verbosity has imho no influence. I'd rather say the following points are important: - the project is not on github, issue tracker looks like from 2 centuries ago, ditto website, several different forum (maillists) instead of e.g. one discourse instance for the 'whole pascal project' - the granularity of the code libraries is difficult (compiler, rtl, component sets (ui and non-ui), tools, lazarus, web, ...). You cannot just clone one of these parts and work on it - no (fully supported) Cocoa support and thus the Mac platform is a bit handicapped (32bit Carbon), too many obscure legacy platforms, too many options, too complicated - no modern defacto standards, e.g. md/rst formatted docu, different syntaxes/dialects (fpc, delphi, mse, oxygene, smartpascal, etc...) - iirc license situation is a bit 'chaotic' (some LGPL 2.1 (with exception), some GPL 2 (3?), some MPL 1.1/2, more?) and in comparision to newer languages, e.g. go/rust (MIT, APL) the licenses are more (copyleft) restrictive. I like that more modern environments dropped ideological for pragmatic - afaik no big company/organization invests money into the pascal ecosystem (if this were the case, probably most of the points above would be different) This is just to say why I think it is not more popular, I very much appreciate the project/work, it's great!

samuell 10y ago
The forums (and I think wiki) etc are astonishingly up-to-date though in my experience, and I have mostly got a useful answer in the forum within an hour or so, so I would say, don't judge the book by the cover :)
- chappi42 10y ago
  I agree. Nevertheless in the world of today the cover is important too :) I think...