Awesome Pascal – A curated list of Delphi, FreePascal, and Pascal shiny things

You can certainly make money with it. People still pay for native-code software after all.

Pretend you want to write a ... oh, I dunno, let's say Task tracker, collaboration tool, or order-entry, or some other office productivity tool, consisting of only a few forms.

Sure, you can make a web-based UI, and there's many advantages to doing so, or you could make it a native application, and there's many advantages there too.

I've used the Lazarus IDE to make a small productivity application, and it was by far much easier than to make a web-based GUI.

It was also instant startup, never used more than around 30MB of RAM and ran insanely fast compared to the web-based "native" applications we have now.

If you look at TIOBE Index, you will see that Delphi/Object Pascal (presently #12) is often ranked above such notables as Go (Golang), Swift, Ruby, Rust, and Lua. A list of languages many would argue a person could make a name for themselves with.

Not saying that TIOBE is the "be all, end all", but it's not like nobody knows Delphi/Pascal or that there aren't companies that have lots of code written in it. To include that Delphi/Pascal is still being taught in many school systems throughout the world (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHcqZEtWBy0&list=PLxAS51iVMj...).

We also have to be mindful to separate from the propaganda and hit jobs by corporate backed competing programming languages that would prefer people not know how competitive, powerful, and useful that Object Pascal is.

FWIW a package can provide components but it should be possible to do HTTP requests out of the box without installing anything using the FPHttpClient unit (there is also a server one too if you need it), which is part of FCL (which is available by default on Lazarus projects):

    {$mode objfpc}
    uses FPHttpClient;
    begin
      with TFPHttpClient.Create(nil) do
        try
          Writeln(Get('http://example.org'))
        finally
          Free
        end
    end.

[0] https://www.freepascal.org/daily/packages/fcl-web/fphttpclie...

Not at all. Lazarus being community project is rough in edges but Delphi runs on "automatic" just fine.

>"and simple on a level reminiscent of Visual Basic"

It runs circles around it and the language has all modern doodads.

That is included now

Although I maintain my own functions for that

So, that said, looking back and trying to teach the current generation basic programming concepts beyond variables/loops/etc, aka data structures. I repeatedly think that my high school data structures/etc teachers did a far better job than the current crop trying to wedge more advanced computer science topics into languages like Java, python, C++ or even C. The replacements (Rust) are bad or worse for teaching these concepts because the language just simply gets in the way to much. C is maybe the best of the allowed choices because its possible to write say linked lists, or linked tree structures fairly easy but its got so many foot guns that Pascal manages to avoid. Languages like C++ might be reasonable, until some prof dictates that the class should be using std::unique_ptr() or whatever, which just adds confusion to something that should at its heart be fairly simple.

So in the end, I think Niklaus Wirth actually has a bit of an masterpiece in Pascal when it comes to creating a language for teaching computer science topics.

The fact that I also convinced the place I worked to use Delphi on a couple of greenfield projects in the mid 1990's and that was probably some of the most productive work I've ever done shows that pascal also works just fine in a commercial setting.

As a consequence out of necessity a couple of years later I ended up self teaching myself PHP then Ruby then JS. These days I'm pretty proficient with it.

I had an easier time doing it because of those early concepts I learned with Pascal.

I often wonder what would have happened if I had learned C++ instead.

Although I've had previous contacts with computers, my first personal computer was a windows box in the beginning of the second half of the 90's. Never had in my mind "windows is best".

A couple more well known titles are:

  - BeyondCompare  
  - InnoSetup  
  - Nero Burning ROM  
  - Macromedia Dreamweaver!

https://spacewell.com/brands/mcs-iwms/

I wish I had instead learned Go and Rust.

The tooling around C++ was phenomenal, with Turbo C++, Borland C++, and C++ Builder. But the tooling around Rust is just as good or better now, in my opinion.