Promoting Free Pascal in Schools

**dmantione** · 28-05-2006, 01:10 PM

While it is abviously true that educational institutions educate what the market demands, they are also have a certain resistance against the current programming hypes. I.e. the market once wanted them to educate Visual Basic developers, however most universities resisted the pressure.

For the same reason many schools and universities consider C/C++ an unacceptable language for beginners. A lot of them have embraced Java, which indeed solves some deficiencies of C, unfortunately it introduces others.

Without question, many universities start in C/C++, and not withotu reason, as in teh current world, most software is going to be written in it, so there is something to say to not to withold students this knowledge.

On the other hand, there are still a lot of arguments in favour of Pascal nowadays, and it never hurts to communicate that.

I think there is a network, schools have a influence what companies use, and companies have an influence what shools use. There is a third important group, and that is to which we belong: Amateurs, and this is often written with a big A to emphasize the role they played into the direction the computer industry took.

To make Pascal attractive for the enterprise, one way is to have a good amateur base: I.e. compare it to Linux or PHP, it got into the enterprise because amateurs used it, and slowly got developed to the level it was more attractive for enterprises than other solutions. In fact, it can also be said that Delphi became less attractive to amateurs over the years, and as a result it became harder for companies to recruit good Delphi programmers.

**WILL** · 28-05-2006, 09:52 PM

Originally Posted by AthenaOfDelphi

So I think teaching them the basics using older versions which don't have that overhead isn't such a bad thing.

Well why not newer versions with little overhead?

Whats everyone got against variation these days! :lol: Seriously though, I can see the demand on these developer tools Lazarus, Delphi and FPC becoming greater as the interest increases. And with that the need for different 'editions' this varying needs and skillsets. Borland used to get that, but sort of dropped the ball and has become some ALM monster. The FPC team, doesn't have all the manpower I think it needs to do that quite yet. And I couldn't begin to tell you about the Lazarus people, they haven't invited my into their 'click' yet.

Yet... :twisted: [size=9px](Hey, I'm damn nosy when I want something, ok?! :lol

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But no response to my little group idea? Noone is interested in something like that? It would sort of help to map out all the issues and factors relating to the success of Pascal (and Object Pascal) in the marketplace and popularity over the net and in schools.

I think a Pascal Advocates network would help grow those amatures that Dani?´l is talking about. I often look at PHP and MySQL's success and think to myself, they got hat popular off of their own hard work... it's gotta be possible to do the same with something that is already as estabilished as Pascal. We just need to make enough noise.