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The pascal thing has its own advantages/disadvantages. Finding people with pascal experience is going to be difficult, but i'm not sure this is really any worse

The pascal thing has its own advantages/disadvantages. Finding people with pascal experience is going to be difficult, but i'm not sure this is really any worse than some of the web/framework wars. Pick a framework and likely in 5 years your going to have problems finding people who are experts in it because they have all moved to something else (although maybe that is settling down angular/react are still around). OTOH, Pascal is a far simpler language than JS, for sure it has fewer gochas than JS does at this point, and it supports proper threading if you happen to need that among other things. Its definitely stagnated, but that's probably a good thing if you plan on building a long term business around it. I'm not sure I would consider editor features like auto completion very high on my technology selection, particularly since you can 1. fix it, 2. use a different editor. I would worry about hidpi support with Lazarus, and how well the android/ios/mac bindings actually work. Maybe a few other things too, basically things that are going to be so large a work item that fixing them is going to outweigh any advantages of picking the tool. I think electron has at least a dozen of these, and that would push me away from it. From where I stand, electron is closer to java in the long term results.

ihateolives 5y ago
Autocomplete was one example, but I wouldn't underestimate the importance of tooling when you want to onboard people new to the language. Does fp even have package/dependency manager? How good are linters? I wrote my first pieces of shitty Turbo C code before autocomplete was a thing, in a DOS editor. There was no discovery of language syntax or features, you had to have a paper manual open on your desk. So I got frustrated, didn't stick around (dumb decision in retrospective), turned to webdev, at least the turnaround from code to result was quicker. For some time I thought it couldn't get any better than syntax highlighting, but it did. And now I just don't want to work with languages that don't have good lsp support. Been there, done that, nope, not going back.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Does fp even have package/dependency manager? Sigh... "Does [Product X] even have [solution for Product Y problem]?" A "package/dependency manager" is only necessary in languages based on using umpteen million unvetted modules downloaded from the net. Not all languages work like JavaScript in that respect.

ihateolives 5y ago

Autocomplete was one example, but I wouldn't underestimate the importance of tooling when you want to onboard people new to the language. Does fp even have package/dependency manager? How good are linters? I wrote my first pieces of shitty Turbo C code before autocomplete was a thing, in a DOS editor. There was no discovery of language syntax or features, you had to have a paper manual open on your desk. So I got frustrated, didn't stick around (dumb decision in retrospective), turned to webdev, at least the turnaround from code to result was quicker. For some time I thought it couldn't get any better than syntax highlighting, but it did. And now I just don't want to work with languages that don't have good lsp support. Been there, done that, nope, not going back.

CRConrad 5y ago
> Does fp even have package/dependency manager? Sigh... "Does [Product X] even have [solution for Product Y problem]?" A "package/dependency manager" is only necessary in languages based on using umpteen million unvetted modules downloaded from the net. Not all languages work like JavaScript in that respect.