Hello,

After too much thinking I'ved decided to leave here. I don't know if this is permanent or not, but I can't for now continue to be here.

I'ved wrote about it here:
http://idkn.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/goodbye-pascal/

Goodbye and thanks for the fishes

Ido

We're sorry to see you go. However looking at your comments, I'd say that I feel under much less pressure to defend my use of Pascal than I did 25 years or so ago: unlike the situation then just about everybody has agreed that structured languages are vastly superior to BASIC/COBOL/FORTRAN and once you strip away the syntactic differences they have, to a very large extent, converged.

As somebody said a few days ago, if you don't want to use extensions to the underlying language- array constructors, class helpers and so on- you don't have to. And because the language is strongly-typed it's unusual for a coding error to match a recently-introduced construct "by accident".

But I suppose all this begs the question: if one decides not to use Object Pascal, what are the viable alternatives?

In our previous episode, Mark Morgan Lloyd said:

But I suppose all this begs the question: if one decides not to use Object Pascal, what are the viable alternatives?

While hobbywise, I won't let go of FPC (and Wirthian languages) that quickly, professionally it is different.

Currently, for me it is not really a problem (small company, my preference has the most weight), but there was some discussion a while back of hiring more programmers and cooperating with certain other (SCADA like) companies, so there was some discussion.

In my case the only viable alternative is C++, but I'm somewhat embedded with a bit of realtime requirement. Sometimes I think it would be easier even now, but I have previous MFC experience, and that still scares me a bit. (IOW, if you go back to C++, what will you use as GUI?)

In my previous job, I was more standard business apps, and then the only viable alternative is C# IMHO.

One doesn't have to like it, but if I'm leaving Pascal because it is too tiring to defend being in a niche, then you won't pick up some other niche, and the above are (to me) the only viable choices.

The SCADA package we inherited was written in a bastard mix of three versions of MS C, plus a spreadsheet in MS Pascal and assembler interfaces to an IBM communications controller. I replaced it by Delphi code with PostgreSQL as backend, and am completely impenitent.

But is MS really committed to C# and .NET, and if not could it drown Mono etc. out of spite? Which leaves C++, which as I see it has the same issues as Object Pascal except that lots more people use it.

In our previous episode, Mark Morgan Lloyd said:

As said, now it is not so much of an issue, but in my last job I got tired of every problem being blamed on Delphi and having to defend it, or worse, by default have to step up and fix it.

That's the problem. Constantly having to defend it, having to deal with all your suppliers, and beg them for plain C API dlls, for examples (simple and console based so you can port them) etc etc. Not if you can do it, or if it is technically sane.

In my currently job I'm the only programmer (though my boss is also somewhat able in that department), so that is less of a problem, at least Delphi has become even more of an island, or become totally backwards incompatible.

OTOH, the lack of progress is bothering me. The fact that generics still don't do inline for instance.

For pure businessprogramming, I think the chance that MS gives up C++ and the parts that belong to it (MFC) are way, way higher than MS giving up C#/.NET.

Marco van de Voort wrote

bit. (IOW, if you go back to C++, what will you use as GUI?)

You would be crazy & Jonas: it's a figure of speech] if you don't choose Qt.

One doesn't have to like it, but if I'm leaving Pascal because it is too tiring to defend being in a niche,

Bickering in the community should also be taken into account. Though that will make me leave the community, but maybe not the language (yet).

On a side note:
I too am retraining in another language that has a better commercial future for me. For those that didn't know, I am an independent contractor.

Regards,
- Graeme -

It's sad to see a Pascalian go, but no problem, I've seen this before. Well, if you've tried several other languages developed by more than one team (C, C++, etc. that has standards or widely implemented) you'll feel the same way as you wrote in your blog. They do have extensions (sometimes a lot, weird, sometimes so Pascal :)). Actually, if you keep using only what you want to use, having those unPascalish features shouldn't be a problem. But it's your choice anyway. Feel free to come back when you've faced what I said.

Hmm, I can understand all those problems defending themselves using a "strange" language - I'm actually a Smalltalker. The situation here is even worse than personally look at FreePascal, because it is much easier to write dynamic libraries in this language for several operating systems and I like the possibilities to write - with one system - for several platforms. And I hope, that perhaps I might use it under Raspberry PI in the future.

Thinking about switching to other languages ? Yes, very often - but which language? People talking about C++ (but this is just a language disaster), about C# (though Microsoft with Windows8 is actually not very strong behind this any more) and then we come to Java.

But ALL these languages faces one problem (and will get problems there): browser platform development and the radical evolutions there. And simply because of this I decided to go towards Javascript.

And this means, that I can stay with Smalltalk (or with Pascal) for specific tasks, but GUI development *will* go into browser for lots of applications.

Marten

QT in comercial as in private coding projects is very wide spread. It might be due to the fact it covers most if not all major platforms. C++ is the mainly used tool - if you are capable of it then try one or two tutorials to get a clue on that toolkit. It should be long term available that far as i understood as it comes with sources.

On the other hand i've heared about people having some need for extra brain when going from one major version of QT to the next one. I really dont want to say its a no-go or its a big headache but its just some effort for those folks.

-Alex.