Hi,

I wonder how can we make Pascal and FPC more attractive to people, and I believe in what Donal Knuth have said:

"The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language."

So I believe that if we will change the name, it might help. What do you think ? And what name will you prefer to see FPC as ?

Ido

ik wrote

So I believe that if we will change the name, it might help. What do you think ?

I think it will have very little effect. Just look at D: it's a lot like C (so the C crowd isn't immediately put off by it), it has a "non-offensive" name, it's quite powerful, fixes a lot of C deficiencies, is OOP and yet it's not particularly popular.

It's silly to change the name, especially because the language actually is Object Pascal. Next, we'd have to remove begin/end (that reminds too much of Pascal), allow a semi-colon before "else" (it's typically Pascal that this is not allowed), etc. It's a waste of effort.

Jonas

Here is a suggestion:

Called it puma ! :)

Like the animal on the website.

Puma's are fast.

And that's a big adventage of Pascal/Delphi it compiles lightning fast compared to C/C++ crap.

Bye,
Skybuck.

Before assuming FPC isn't atracting users, why don't we start tracking new users and compare it's evolution month by month, year by year. With the help of this method, we can figure out some ways to market FreePascal and Lazarus.

We can start by extracting the subscription date of each user of our mailing lists (I don't know if it's possible). After that, it's easy to create statistics and take the corresponding actions.

Leonardo.

____________________________________________________________________________________ Choose the right car based on your needs. Check out Yahoo! Autos new Car Finder tool. http://autos.yahoo.com/carfinder/

Hi,

Sorry if I sound a bit harsh, I'm not attacking you personally :)

Leonardo M. Ramé wrote

Before assuming FPC isn't attracting users, why don't we start tracking new users and compare it's evolution month by month, year by year. With the help of this method, we can figure out some ways to market FreePascal and Lazarus.

I try in the past few years to attract more people in my country to use (Object) Pascal and FPC. On Friday, I've been on an open source event named August Penguin, it was the 6 year that this event exists. In the past 3 events I have tried to make some sort of awareness regarding FPC, and it still does not work. I have created a lecture and gave it twice (about Object Pascal and FPC), still did not made any waves.. On Friday, when I mentioned Pascal, I received reactions of "will stop talking about it already". I must say that the audience that I keep trying to get are developers etc.. and not any one on the street.

We can start by extracting the subscription date of each user of our mailing lists (I don't know if it's possible). After that, it's easy to create statistics and take the corresponding actions.

I joined this malling list not that long ago, however I use FPC for several years now, and I also used Delphi for more then 7 years... So how can you know who is new ?

Leonardo.

Ido

Op Sun, 12 Aug 2007, schreef Leonardo M. Ramé:

I don't have historic data of the mailinglists. There are about 800 people subscribed to fpc-pascal and 500 fpc-devel subscription.

The forum post statistics provide some historic data:

http://community.freepascal.org:10000/bboards/statistics

There is also a non public pages to show new user registrations, which is currently between 50-70 new users/month. In total there are about 12000 users, of which about 1081 have logged in during the last 365 days.

Further, there is the sourceforge download statistics, which have some history too.

Overall, I don't think we are doing bad.

Daniël

I joined this malling list not that long ago, however I use FPC for several years now, and I also used Delphi for more then 7 years... So how can you know who is new ?

Well, we can't get really accurate dates, but some aproximations based on mailing lists subscription could show us some important numbers. Of course this isn't the best measurement method, it's just an idea, maybe a better one could be to look at other languages (PHP, Python, Ruby or Linux Os) and learn how they know how much users have. Another one could be a "FPC Counter", just like http://counter.li.org/

-- Leonardo

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-- Dani�l Mantione wrote

Overall, I don't think we are doing bad.

I totally agree with you.

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Well there are some things ofcourse wrong with Free Pascal:

1. First the name:

"Free"

Bussiness people don't believe in "Free".

2. Free Pascal Quality itself:

When I see simple things not working like:

Read or Readln or whatever, I run away screaming from Free Pascal ;) :)

3. It doesn't have an advanced development environment like Visual Studio 2005 or Delphi 7 / Delphi 2007 (last one sucky though)

I have seen onde IDE Lazareus or something like that and it's a clone of Delphi 7 but it doesn't have the quality yet :)

4. Pascal sounds oooooldddddddddd and reminds people of the 16 bit dos/days. Yak ! Full of frustration, limitations, and code going into the waste basket ;) :)

5. Special features for Free Pascal, what does it offer that the other tools do not ?

I know free pascal can cross compile but for now I only need to compile for Windows 32 bit and maybe Windows 64 bit in the future ;)

What features does free pascal offer for Win32 or Win64 development which other environments do not ?

It has to stand out to attract developers ;)

That's my thoughts on it ;)

Bye,
Skybuck.

Well this won't work:

1. People on free pascal mailing list does not mean they use free pascal, they just interested in reading about it, and maybe not even that ;)

2. People downloading free pascal does not mean they use free pascal, maybe they tried it out and decided it was not for them.

Here is a good idea:

3. Start selling a free pascal distribution with maybe extra "service contract" meaning bugs for bussiness users get fixed much more quickly, and then count the number of sales LOL ;) :)

Also maybe add extra features for bussiness users, maybe some database support or anything else they ask for.

Ofcourse there is also the free user base, maybe hobbists or cheap skates lol.

4. Another idea might be to look for applications compiled with free pascal.

5. And finally ofcourse the all spieing eye which counts the number of times free pascal gets run by the user and reports it to a website.

I would not feel totally comfortable using such a tool with such a feature !

Definetly too spyie.

6. The number of libraries/components written for Free Pascal.

7. Websites written for free pascal, documentations and such.

Look at all this together I think the reality if pretty obvious free pascal not used that much.

Not as much as visual c/c++/c# or Delphi which has a huge number of websites.

Let's google a bit:

Borland Delphi: 2.5 million hits

Free Pascal: 2,680,000 hits

So I believe that if we will change the name, it might help.

This kind of topic had been arised a few times. Basically I agree with this idea if it means we should change the name of the compiler, not the name of the language itself.

We just can't change the language name, just like what Jonas had said, it's just simply (object) pascal. However, we could learn from Borland that named their IDE as "Delphi" though it still uses object pascal language. Or learn from SUN, that named their language as "Java" though it's pretty another variant of C++.

Somehow good names are able to bring lucks and bussiness people just love good names (they called them as "marketable"). :D

What do you think ? And what name will you prefer to see FPC as ?

I don't have good ideas, yet. But it should able to reflect FreePascal very well, like fast, cross platform, free, etc. Puma sounds nice, but we must open for other alternatives. ;)

-Bee-

has Bee.ography at:
http://beeography.wordpress.com

Sory for top posting, I am using a phone...
1. There is nothing wrong with "Free" in the name. Many open-source apps have that. Business people trust their wallets. And here, a lot more trust Linux and Open apps. If you know how to present that.

2. I don't know what is wrong on your side, but my side, I did few lightweight applications on linux (including console tcpd services with mysql database background and serial communication) which are working just fine.

3. Maybe this is not the idea. It is so powerfull on console type applications for now. And there are still many console apps needs with networking and database support. And when you can do that freely, fast and on an open OS, this is great.

4. This name made me download (and this old reminders :))

5. Who needs Windows? :))

By me, FPC is fine and I am still using this as a good alternative writing programs to use my own developped hardware, with database and communication support. So, keep it on.

Best regards,
Mihai

Well there are some things ofcourse wrong with Free Pascal:

1. First the name:

"Free"

Bussiness people don't believe in "Free".

2. Free Pascal Quality itself:

When I see simple things not working like:

Read or Readln or whatever, I run away screaming from Free Pascal ;) :)

3. It doesn't have an advanced development environment like Visual Studio 2005 or Delphi 7 / Delphi 2007 (last one sucky though)

I have seen onde IDE Lazareus or something like that and it's a clone of Delphi 7 but it doesn't have the quality yet :)

4. Pascal sounds oooooldddddddddd and reminds people of the 16 bit dos/days. Yak ! Full of frustration, limitations, and code going into the waste basket ;) :)

5. Special features for Free Pascal, what does it offer that the other tools do not ?

I know free pascal can cross compile but for now I only need to compile for Windows 32 bit and maybe Windows 64 bit in the future ;)

What features does free pascal offer for Win32 or Win64 development which other environments do not ?

It has to stand out to attract developers ;)

That's my thoughts on it ;)

Bye,
Skybuck.

First you must define a target in business people. Which is easy. First and for all, FPC is interested in business people that have something to offer.

And offering a helping hand in developing/improving the project is more important than money here.

The kind of business people that don't believe in "Free" are in general not our target in the first place.

2. Free Pascal Quality itself: When I see simple things not working like: Read or Readln or whatever, I run away screaming from Free Pascal ;) :)

I don't get this.

That goes for anything that still must be developed/fixed.

4. Pascal sounds oooooldddddddddd and reminds people of the 16 bit dos/days. Yak ! Full of frustration, limitations, and code going into the waste basket ;) :)

But are we responsible for those feelings? Lots of non C users describe C as a overgrown macro assembler, but I don't see C changing its name.

Moreover rebranding hurts our image with users that we are already have in a kind of feeble attempt to get users we might never get anyway?

5. Special features for Free Pascal, what does it offer that the other tools do not ?

That is fairly easy. None of the tools you compare it with above is multiplatform.

I've seen no Win64 Delphi like. And one can't seriously compare MFC to Delphi. FPC's main goal is portability anyway, not competing with the existing tools on Win32 head on.

It has to stand out to attract developers ;)

It already does.

Skybuck Flying wrote

Well there are some things ofcourse wrong with Free Pascal:

I'm assuming you were being sarcastic or ironic. You can assume the same when you read this reply.

So what ?
We don't believe in such business people in the first place.

If you see a bug, please file a report. All the rest is FUD.

And be realistic: I asked a C++ programmer how to read a simple string from file. After 4 hours of looking through the MFC help, he had to admit that he didn't know how. And this is NOT a joke, but a real life situation. The guy was payed more than I was.

Well. Delphi 7 crashes every second debug run in my day-time job. Lazarus still has to crash on me.

Please provide REAL arguments, REAL missing features. All the rest is FUD.

Use Lazarus for a month daily, to develop a real program, and then come back. People who have used lazarus for about 1 hour and then tell us 'this and that feature is not working'
just do not have any right of voice. Lazarus has quite a lot of options which Delphi does not have, and vice versa. You must go through a learning curve, like with any other product.

You can't judge a book by looking at its cover.

4. Pascal sounds oooooldddddddddd and reminds people of the 16 bit dos/days. Yak ! Full of frustration, limitations, and code going into the waste basket ;) :)

Only for stupid programmers. We are not interested in people who look only to the package or the surface. They are hype-sensitive and will disappear as soon as the next hype comes along.

5. Special features for Free Pascal, what does it offer that the other tools do not ?

The question is not what it has to offer more: the question is what the other tools offer more. The answer is: Nothing whatsoever. At most, they save some typing using some obscure language features. So what ? Use code templates in your favourite IDE, and you'll have to type even less.

Pascal is a decent language, just like any other. Why would we need to defend it ? We prove daily that it 'just works'.

For a start: it works; Just start Lazarus. You mentioned Delphi: it does not work.

If you see a business person, do not spread FUD, give real arguments.

I converted my company from a VB company to a Delphi company. I just used Delphi, and simply showed to them that I could do the work better, cleaner and faster than they did in the past.

Any business man should be sensitive to that: time is money.

Michael.

I fully agree here! I remember it very clearly. When I started using Lazarus I got so frustrated, but that was only because I was used to the Delphi IDE (and the locations of it's options). After working with Lazarus for a couple of weeks, I had to maintain a old product in Delphi. I got so frustrated with Delphi!! Delphi had some vital missing features. :-)
I think Lazarus is great! Still a bit rough on the edges, but great!

Regards,
- Graeme -

As the subject already suggest, this thread is off-topic here and already quite lengthy. I'd like to kindly ask everybody interested in this discussion to move it to fpc-other list, which is dedicated to this kind of stuff.

Thanks a lot

Tomas

Hi Michael,

I will write here instead of inline...
I personally know a company that wrote a product using Delphi, and had an already existed product, but when they came to raise some money, the only thing that really interested the investors where that they use Delphi instead of Java, and forced the company to rewrite *everything* to Java, making a lot of new problems, and things that did worked on Delphi, did not work on the Java implementation, and at the end the company disappeared from the face of the earth...

Another not Pascal related argument is from my last work place... The company developed a vulnerability assessment tool, but when we found a problem and then found out it was a false positive or a false negative, we could not use that terms, we needed to use the terms of "bugs" or "glitches" because it sounds better...

I have a lot more examples of such problems using the "Pascal" and the way it "sounds"...

And in the bottom line, it's all about marketing.

Ido

Puff, Delphi IDE is way faster then Lazarus. Beside of the need of that idiotic X11 under MacOSX. I will just develop my applications in Mono together with Cocoa# this works perfectly well together with Chrome. :)

Weyert de Boer wrote

Puff, Delphi IDE is way faster then Lazarus. Beside of the need of that idiotic X11 under MacOSX. I will just develop my applications in Mono together with Cocoa# this works perfectly well together with Chrome. :)

Good arguments. A name change would make no difference.

Vincent

Puff, Delphi IDE is way faster then Lazarus. Beside of the need of that idiotic X11 under MacOSX. I will just develop my applications in Mono together with Cocoa# this works perfectly well together with Chrome. :)

And how would a name change change this?

Ops, Vincents was quicker ;(

For business maybe.

People forget the bottom line; FPC and Lazarus are HOBBY projects for the core developers. We do not want or need to make money with them. Otherwise we would not have made it open source in the first place.

If you do happen to make money on the side with it: congratulations.

But do not expect business arguments to have any influence whatsoever on the core developers. That includes name changes, which are simply not debatable.

Michael.

Puff, Delphi IDE is way faster then Lazarus. Beside of the need of that idiotic X11 under MacOSX. I will just develop my applications in Mono together with Cocoa# this works perfectly well together with Chrome. :)

Is that combination (C#/Mono-Cocoa#) portable? It is not fair to compare a portable solution to a non portable.

One can develop FPC for OSX with Carbon too. (and that is done, e.g. Pixel).

Nothing, indeed. I don't think even a name change will help. Most people don't just like the language itself: Pascal. If you change the name you are just fooling yourself.

Yours,
Weyert de Boer

Also for Open source projects (look for Linux as an example).

The project IMHO is far from only be a hobby, because it catch up additional people, and there are commercial program using that hobby, and if you want believe that is should only be something small,then why do you support so much things, instead of just supporting your own systems ?! it been a long time since it was only a hobby, now it's a project with audience.

Michael.

Ido

The project itself is still a (serious) hobby. Maybe hobby is a bad word. Driven by idealism, and non-commercial in principle.

Just like e.g. a foundation can be non-commercial, go for a idealistic goal, and still can have scores of (paid) employees.

Maybe I wasn't clear. It's not about big or small.

It's about motivation. The motivation for the core people is not to make money. The motivation is to create a superior product.

As such, 'business' arguments do not influence the motivation.

If people want to make money with it: By all means, do ! We explicitly changed the license to modified LGPL so you can make money ! So please, get rich !

But do not expect us to change our motivation.

Changing the name would be betraying ourselves, and all what Free Pascal stands for: a free, Open Source, portable Pascal system.

Michael.

That is more or less what I wanted to get across, yes.

Thanks, Marco :-)

Michael.

It would probably help if it had a name other than "Free". It refers to free as in OS, of course, but many people read it as "free" (as in beer) and thus cheap and nasty. It wouldn't bother me if it gets a new name or not, but I think that many people would view it in a better light. It sure wouldn't hurt if FPC had a sexier name. It would probably even help students get into it more as there is a definite "cool" factor in using "Mono" or "C sharp" or "dot NET" or various other names that have more style. Even poor old Lazarus was a leper. What does that say to the casual observer? Software for outcasts? Pascal already has a reputation for being a fringe technology.

It doesn't have to be about business in order for a name to effect support for a solution (such as FPC).

Agreed. Marketing is not restricted to commerce. IBM uses the term "mindshare" to describe how much of people's thinking a product or technology (such as FPC) occupies - a concept specifically divorced from the concept of "marketshare". Do we (as the FPC community) really want to reach the situation where noone is using the language? I guess not. In which case we DO need "mindshare". Call it marketing, or call it "relevance". However you want to cut it, we need it in order to be meaningful. Not saying that we should change the name, necessarily, but we shouldn't be one-eyed about the idea.

If that is the case, then FPC should not be used for industrial applications. This idea suggests that FPC is a toy. I know it isn't, but if the core team is sending the message that it is, then it doesn't bode well for the future of the project. I am happy to use FPC precisely because it isn't a toy, but a very solid, functional platform which holds its own well, if not ideally against most other platforms. Is that a mistake? I am not convinced it is, but if the core team is of the opinion that the system is just a pastime, perhaps I have the wrong idea entirely?

Agree.

And, FPC is a great bit of gear. It's sad to see people selling it short. The developers have done a excellent job with it (quite simply, it is state of the art). FPC should step forward and stake the claim to the credibility it has earned.

Cheers,
Mark.

It makes better sense when you put it that way.

Cheers,
Mark.

But do not expect us to change our motivation.

This is one of many reasons why I trust FPC over Delphi (Borland/CodeGear): the great and noble motivation of the core developers. I do respect such motivation. Not many developers are able to survive with such motivation. In many cases, such motivation only last at the beginning of the development (v.1.0?). But next, they go commercial (if the product is successful on the market) or go disappear (if the product fails). Hopefully, I wish FPC won't go neither commercial or disappear.

Thank you and salute! ;)

-Bee-

has Bee.ography at:
http://beeography.wordpress.com

Marco van de Voort wrote

One can develop FPC for OSX with Carbon too. (and that is done, e.g. Pixel).

And hopefully not to far in the future using fpGUI as well. :-)

Graeme.

FWIW, I am in the early stages of a commercial development using Free Pascal and have to submit weekly progress reports. I cringe whenever I have to put the phrase "Free Pascal Compiler" in the report! This project is with a company that just spent 4+ million US dollars on a Java solution (client and server side) to replace all their old Pascal code, then, their clients told them they didn't like the Java solution, that they wanted to keep using the Pascal stuff!

Not that the compiler is junky, but the word "Free" does have a negative connotation. Many business people still associate "free software" with that of being low-quality. Business people are used to paying thousands of dollars for any development software worthy of notice, the word "free" doesn't fit into their thinking.

Using the word "free" while reporting, or talking to them, about the project is an oxymoron. I am not "free", I get a substantial hourly rate.

If you renamed it to the "Open Source Pascal Compiler" it would be more accurate?

Oh, and please, please change the name soon, ok? I have a lot more of these reports to write...

Regards,

TomW

This project is with a company that just spent 4+ million USD on a Java solution (client and server side) to replace all their old Pascal code, then, their clients told them they didn't like the Java solution, that they wanted to keep using the Pascal stuff!

Isn't Java also free? :-P

Oh, and please, please change the name soon, ok? I have a lot more of these reports to write...

Then you can simply write it as "FPC" and write the complete name only once on the appendix page (as the reference of the acronym). This way you don't need to cringe all the time. :-D

-Bee-

has Bee.ography at:
http://beeography.wordpress.com

The point is that the compiler is not "free", it is encumbered by a license. People are gaining the idea that Open Source generally equates with "free" (as in no-expense). However, in American English, the word "free" generally means "something of so little value that you can afford to give it away". Perhaps in German it has a different connotation, or in British English...

Regards,

TomW

Probably the same negative connotation I have with "business people" and the quality of "business software" :)

Well, the name Free Pascal Compiler has some history. Initially, I called it FPK Pascal. FPK are my initials. But a lot of people though it means Florian's Pascal Kompiler making Compiler a semi german word (Kompiler with K is never used in German though). Further, when other people joined, I thought the name FPK Pascal isn't appropriate anymore so we looked for a new name which was not that different from the old one and Free Pascal Compiler was a good choice regarding this.

Oh, and please, please change the name soon, ok? I have a lot more of these reports to write...

Register a website businesspascal.biz and make the fpc installer available there so you can write Business Pascal in your reports ;)

And rightly so :-)

Obviously their clients have more sense than this company does...

Well, change their thinking.

You are not doing us or yourself a favour by allowing their braindead habits to continue existing... But if you must, write FPC (to stop you from cringing) or write Lazarus instead.

Michael.

Op Mon, 13 Aug 2007, schreef Michael Van Canneyt:

Obviously their clients have more sense than this company does...

Mod up +1 Insightfull...

Yes, this is the whole point, end users like Pascal applications more than Java applications. (Because their are faster, use les smemory, install easier, ...) Perhaps businessmen like Java more than Pascal, but their likings are bad for their business. This is how you make the point for Pascal.

Daniël

Java is glueware really. It's great for net-traversal situations.

Pascal is an application development platform. And IMHO, the best of breed.

We use both for situations where they are suited, respectively.

Having said that, IT departments in businesses are amazingly stupid and opt for the wrong platform maybe 90% of the time.

Selling them the right technology solution is easy when your product is based on a modern sounding technology, like "Java", but somewhat trickier if your platform wears corduroy and a tweed jacket. But not impossible.

Pascal is a great technology. But it could do with some new clothes. In this case, a new name would definitely help. We are very un-hip. And not just to business - we don't seem to be in Summer of Code for the same basic reason (or reasons stemming from the same).

I don't think any of us are promoting the interests of business ahead of other concerns, or the adoration of commercialism. But on balance, our square image costs us unnecessarily - in business, with students, and in general. We could pick a cool new name. It's a bit vain, but it would probably be effective.

But... I don't think we should fight each other over the issue. We are all united in our appreciation of Pascal. And if the core developers want to keep the name, I certainly respect that, even if I question the benefits of doing so.

Food for thought.

Cheers,
Mark.

I am doing two free-lance projects at the moment for two clients. One insists that I use C++ and Qt. When I suggested Delphi (I started this 5 years ago) he was offended. The other client didn't care. When I told him about installation of one singe EXE (no libraries, dll's and other dependencies) he approved instantly. Both projects are still active today. The smaller Qt project is still in alpha while the (now) lazarus project is past version 2.0. I don't mind the C++ project as much since I earn more $$ with it. I do a lot more work for the same result - and I am paid by the day.

I have no problem with the 'Free' in Free Pascal since the new and improved pascal I am using today cost the client so much less than the Delphi of yesterday. Of course he mainly sees me using Lazarus, so that may help.

You mean like "industry standard" means cheaply produced, "commercial" means "expensive" and "enterprise" rougly equates robbery ?