Paul van Helden wrote: > Martin wrote: > I don't see why changing the name. Any Name except for "Pascal > RAD-IDE" needs branding => users have to learn to associate it with a > pascal RAD-IDE. Well, perhaps there are other people that are having the same experience as myself: When people ask me what I use for developing my software the answer is usually "Free Pascal & Lazarus". The response is aways a puzzled look or a pause on the other end of the phone line, but my concern is that it doesn't even sound cool. A puzzled+mildly_impressed look would be so much better than a puzzled+what_is_this_guy_smoking? look. There are so many cool sounding programming languages out there, like "Python" or "Ruby on Rails" (check their website for a simple and to-the-point extremely newbie friendly home page: http://rubyonrails.org/). When you say "Free Pascal & Lazarus", someone who knows a little about computer science will immediately think of an old teaching language that nobody uses (well, that's what they think) but the rest would have forgotten the word "Pascal" whilst digesting the word "Lazarus". "Hmmm, wasn't that some dude mentioned in the Bible?". The symbology of some project "raised from the dead" will be lost on most people, I think, and perhaps that is a good thing. Who cares if the project was once dead? What matters is that it is now an incredibly lively project! Besides, there might be many people in this community who objects to that part of "written history"... Perhaps my problem is with the separation of the IDE and the language. I don't say "Object Pascal & Delphi". The word "Delphi" serves as a complete description to those who know what it is, while sounding mildly cool to those who don't have a clue. (In fact, it seems many people who have heard of both Delphi and VB think that the former is some kind of clone of the latter!). People who don't know much about Delphi, don't associate it with Pascal, they just have this vague idea that it is that VB-like thing that is a bit cooler and can create apps faster. Then also the word "Free". Aren't nearly all (cool) programming languages free? In English, as you know, it is unfortunate that free is used more in the beer context than in the speech context. It simply doesn't sound "cool" anymore. Furthermore, I don't think the current $modes supported by FPC can be called Pascal anymore. They are far removed Pascal-like dialects, a bit like Afrikaans that originated from Dutch, 300 years ago, and used to be called "Kitchen Dutch". That might as well have been "Free Dutch"... At least "Object Pascal" implies that the original Pascal language was heavily modified. "Free" implies no such thing. Why this heavy emphasis on exterior appearances (ie. being "cool")? all the uber geeks might ask. It is important because most decision makers, clients and users are not geeks. These people need to feel good about the money they are spending. I believe a large part of Oracle's success can be attributed to the really cool name. (What an amazingly cool name for such a cr at p database, and don't tell me "Delphi" wasn't inspired by "Oracle"). Just look around you and see all the billboards with pretty people on them. This is the society we live in, like it or not. I don't, but if we want to be anti-establishment, why not just change the name to something really horrible and spell it with all small caps...... like git. (ouch) Just my 2c :-)

I don't think that changing the name is likely, but just a couple of things to take into consideration: 1) Currently searching "Lazarus" gives you the no 1 hit on google (admittedly on Yahoo and Bing this application doesn't reach page 1) 2) Big legacy... ?