Promoting Free Pascal in Schools

[michalis]

But Debian, as far as I know has gotten a lot better at this. Plus they are often up to date with everything. AND they have a Lazarus package that I believe is up to date! (Laz ppl correct me if I'm wrong on this?)

Debian and up to date?! They are still shipping fpc 1.9.4!

(sorry for going off-topic again...)

It's not so bad --- It's 2.0.0 in etch (testing distribution). 1.9.4 is in sarge (stable). It's normal that stable distribution doesn't have most up-to-date software as it's frozen.

But actually it is bad --- why 2.0.0, not 2.0.2 ? I don't know, most probably the maintainer doesn't have enough time... I guess that someone who is familiar with creating Debian packages and has some time should just go and offer help, see http://packages.qa.debian.org/f/fpc.html.

[WILL]

Sarge is actually old now. There has been 2 versions since. Stable is one and the next one which I forget the name to... anyone know?

Well yeah, I think that there really needs to be someone that promotes FPC and Lazarus on Debian (and all the other distros), as it's somewhat a part of the process of keeping Pascal in the eyes of Linux people.

I mean, look how much I bugged Florian about GameBoy Advance and now it's gonna be a part of the next version of FPC. [size=9px](not quite official yet though)[/size]... oh and of course I probable wouldn't have gotten quite as far as we did wiothout the help of Mr. Legolas. He really took that project with both hands!

Anyways, point of note; I think w should all actively push FPC/Lazarus in all these places. Schools, Linux distros, anywhere we can really...

[Robert Kosek]

Semi-aside from the point, I think that we as a community and as pascal programmers need to work on the things like Sly mentioned that make folks think that Pascal is outdated. I don't think it is, and I love using it, so let's cure the perceived issue and improve our favored language.

I also think we need to push for Pascal in schools. It is an excellent language and I have learned much just doing it as a hobby. There is so much you can learn on your own with it, but I think that the perception must be changed for Pascal to be "reaccepted".

[dmantione]

Well, somthing that makes a language appeal to young people is that you can make games in it How many schools are teaching people programming with the CRT unit? :think: That helps of course to the dated image Pascal has.

[Robert Kosek]

Yes, I think the Pascal using curriculae need an update desperately. I think it's time to go VCL and DirectX/OpenGL. But then again, most folks have lost caring for the language somewhere.

[WILL]

What if there was a group with a petition and an active goal of pushing Pascal to all these universities all over the world?

It seems to be the way to get something done. You form an organized group of people that believe something, get it in print, start talking to professionals and the institutions that will make it happen and push for results.

The new Development Company to branch from Borland would definately support it so they are an asset (you would need a bunch of these interested groups) amoung other companies and commercial developers that could back you. It would then be taken quite seriously as it has the support organizations to keep things rolling.


This group's goals would probably be:

:arrow: Establish a presence of the Pascal and Object Pascal languages in secondary and post secondary schools and institutions.

:arrow: Promote Object Pascal in the commercial markets.

:arrow: Establish Object Pascal as a set language standard.

:arrow: Cultivate interest in developer products that use Pascal and Object Pascal and gain these companies' support in the promotion of Object Pascal.


I think that is not too unreasonable. If such an organization exists, with a modivasted leadership, we'd see more possitive amount of interest in Object Pascal.

Talk to the big companies that push Object Pascal. (Borland, RemObjects, WinSoft, Indy, etc) There is a big list! They will want to help and strengthen the point that Object Pascal is very juicy as a commercial development language.

[michalis]

Sarge is actually old now. There has been 2 versions since. Stable is one and the next one which I forget the name to... anyone know?

Just to clarify things:

Sarge (3.1) is the last stable release. There were 2 updates to sarge (3.1r1 and 3.1r2) but these are intentionally limited only to fix security and other serious bugs. Next release is codenamed etch --- currently that's the testing distribution, and it will become next stable release.

[Ingemar]

Yes, I think the Pascal using curriculae need an update desperately. I think it's time to go VCL and DirectX/OpenGL. But then again, most folks have lost caring for the language somewhere.

I did the Pascal interfaces for OpenGL on the Mac myself. It works like charm. I move between Pascal and C a lot, and can easily feel the lower stress level when using OpenGL with Pascal.

C lobbyists keep flaming Pascal for being useless, slow and outdated, and they have been wrong all the time. They often don't even know that you can have more than one source file! :shock: And they don't know about Object Pascal, despite the fact that it predates C++ both as language and as a commericial application building tool. Or maybe they know but don't want to tell?

With the recent new features in implementations like FPC, I think Pascal is quite modern. I am currently spending some of my time learning FPC, and I can't wait until I can do my first FPC game.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

The biggest stepping stone to encouraging more interest in Pascal at any level is industry.

Whilst industry sees Pascal as outdated, it will continue to insist that educational institutions teach C++, Java, C# etc.

Unfortunately, industry is in love with the 'next big thing' because its new, innovative... it must be better... right And of course, we musn't forget the millions of lines of code that already exist... industry will want maintainers for this, so again, they will want C++ and Java.

From my personal experiences, I've come to the conclusion that much of this is down to middle to upper managers, who understand only the latest buzz words. In other words, they don't actually have a clue about what may or may not actually be the best language. One project I worked on, the company had around 15 Delphi developers. We worked our butts off to build this system. It won them some big contracts and was in its own right a fantastic system... at that point, middle management stepped in and decided that the whole thing needed to be re-written in C++ (at the time, C++ was one of the buzz words)... as a consequence, nearly the whole of the development team were forced out or gotten rid of. That is the kind of stupid business decision that drives languages forward, and whilst that sort of thing is happening, an older language, like Pascal, stands little chance of making head way in industry.

Of course as has been pointed out, there are schools that are teaching with older versions of Pascal... now my personal take on this is that the world of windows programming can be more than a little daunting, even for an experienced developer. So I think teaching them the basics using older versions which don't have that overhead isn't such a bad thing. It wouldn't be very good to scare them off. There is also the point that only a small percentage of software engineers are games developers and so it is better to teach the kids stuff that is likely to be useful in a wide range of fields.

I don't actually think the problem is the choice of teaching tool, I think the problem is the kids themselves. They are bombarded with high tech and fancy graphics everywhere and so can't appreciate the simple wonder of writing simple programs, couple this with most kids apparent inability to sit still and concentrate for any longer than about 30 seconds and whatever is used isn't going to garner interest in it.

Personally, I think the key to encouraging Pascal adoption is to snag the people (especially kids) who like to think for themselves... hook them and prove to them that Pascal is a modern language that can compete with C++, Java, C# etc. and it may just start making some headway in industry... when it does that, it will start making headway elsewhere because industrys demand for Pascal programmers will rise.

Just my thoughts :-)

[Ingemar]

One project I worked on, the company had around 15 Delphi developers. We worked our butts off to build this system. It won them some big contracts and was in its own right a fantastic system... at that point, middle management stepped in and decided that the whole thing needed to be re-written in C++ (at the time, C++ was one of the buzz words)... as a consequence, nearly the whole of the development team were forced out or gotten rid of. That is the kind of stupid business decision that drives languages forward, and whilst that sort of thing is happening, an older language, like Pascal, stands little chance of making head way in industry.

That's a horrible story! Really scary - and the worst part is that I do believe you! These things happen, big money is thrown away just because someone told a manager that they should follow a stupid buzz word.

Today, many young programmers go for languages like Python, since it clearly is better than C++, but then they, and their users, suffer from the pains of its poor performance. So there are people who are looking for alternatives.