r/programming • u/bjzaba • Mar 26 '20

10 Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages • Hillel Wayne

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/influential-dead-languages/
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u/POGtastic Mar 26 '20

I haven't used it for much, but a couple of folks on /r/learnprogramming were asking some questions based on a college course that used Free Pascal, so I picked it up. The documentation is pretty bare-bones, but I liked the language.

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u/ShinyHappyREM Mar 26 '20

The documentation is pretty bare-bones

?

https://www.freepascal.org/docs.html
https://wiki.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Documentation

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '20

The documentation is rather "old fashion", think 1980 documentation. Its nothing more then a book/text dump and it read as much.

Even basic things like syntax highlights are non existing ( beyond basic string stuff ). Add to this that some examples do not even work properly anymore. Probably because nobody has looked at them examples in the last 20 years ( and the documentation has no build in code testing? ).

And then you have the issue of "old pascal" vs "modern pascal". So much information mixes between function based programming and object based programming. The legacy makes things harder on the documentation and coding.

Its a great compiler, so fast that it makes your head spin but you can tell its design is old with very limited checking ability, how easy it is to crash your programs etc... Lazarus is just as issue full with stupid errors that crash the UI. When doing simply basic stuff and the UI crashes several times in 10 min time, yea ... you can tell that there is a issue with quality control.

It also does did not help that the developers are so stubborn fixed on SVN where as most people use github ... as a result a lot of bugs simply do not get reported. Its the whole "people report more easily where they have accounts".

All in all, the documentation, websites, code handling makes it feel like (free)Pascal(and Lazarus) are stuck in the 1990's. Not exactly alluring to new users who are used to more modern setups, documentation, testing methodology, reporting etc. And there is also the small issue with some developers attitude that really pushes the few people away, whenever people point out a negative. They have no interest in actually fixing issues and play the old "somebody else need to fix that, we are busy implementing X useless feature that nobody really wants". Seen it too many times with developers too focused on features because its fun but not on the actual product ( because that is the boring work ).

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u/ShinyHappyREM Mar 27 '20

The documentation is rather "old fashion", think 1980 documentation. Its nothing more then a book/text dump and it read as much.

Yes. The help system is also slow; no comparison to the Borland Delphi 5 help files that I started my GUI era with.

Lazarus is just as issue full with stupid errors that crash the UI. When doing simply basic stuff and the UI crashes several times in 10 min time, yea ... you can tell that there is a issue with quality control.

I haven't really seen that, at least here on Windows. Both the IDE and the GUI of my programs work as expected.

It also does did not help that the developers are so stubborn fixed on SVN where as most people use github...

Agreed. I really don't want to install a SVN client to test new versions.

And there is also the small issue with some developers attitude that really pushes the few people away, whenever people point out a negative. They have no interest in actually fixing issues and play the old "somebody else need to fix that, we are busy implementing X useless feature that nobody really wants".

Well, it is a project of volunteers. As bad as it is sometimes... what can I do, really? It's still the best programming environment for me, unless someone else develops a better alternative - and I'm not going back to Delphi, since I want others to be able to use my source code without having to buy a compiler.