Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[brbarkstrom@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, March 16, 2016 at 5:22:02 PM UTC-4, Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> Bob Butler writes on comp.lang.ada:
> > I am not sure if that is true. It could be FreePascal does support the
> > full standard (and there are indeed ISO standards to follow) but also
> > OO and GUI addons. I think a lot of useful code could be written to
> > the standard. It's just that many people want the OO support and the
> > GUI stuff so they tend towards specific implementations. I think it's
> > ill advised for businesses but indeed there are still some using
> > Delphi believe it or not. Most of the Pascal written today outside
> > Delphi is hobbyist stuff. FPC is actually a very nice
> > implementation. It's not portable because nothing else is left, with
> > or without a standard or two.
> 
> The fact that FreePascal supports some ISO or standards is relevant and
> useful *if* it can reject non-compliant programs.    But in its list of
> compiler options I see only:
> 
>   -M<x>  Set language mode to <x>  
>       -Mfpc      Free Pascal dialect (default)  
>       -Mobjfpc   FPC mode with Object Pascal support  
>       -Mdelphi   Delphi 7 compatibility mode  
>       -Mtp       TP/BP 7.0 compatibility mode  
>       -Mmacpas   Macintosh Pascal dialects compatibility mode  
> 
> and no ISO 7185 or ISO 10206.
> 
> --
> Ludovic Brenta.

It might be worth thinking about the investment in time a "hobbyist" must
spend in becoming proficient in whatever environment he or she is working
in.  At one point or another in the last thirty years, I wandered through
FORTRAN, Pascal, Modula II, and Ada, with an occasional segue into Perl
or Python or even R or OpenBUGS.  It seems to me that Ada is a pretty good
general purpose language for almost any application, including concurrent
programming systems.  The minimum time investment is probably about six
months -- although in the last 25 years, we've been inventing languages
of the day at a rate of at least one every week.  GUI's are fairly 
straightforward to write in HTML5 and CSS3.3 (get the Dummies book).

The harder part is to document what you've done and what you've learned
in a form that users can use later.  The Web is littered with discarded
projects that became standards and were then abandoned by their PhD developers
who moved on to other projects (see IsaViz at <https://www.w3.org/2001/11/IsaViz/}.  You'll find a W3C project that's in the usual limbo left when
someone goes off and leaves a project without maintenance personnel).

My own impression is a "hobbyist" developer's time would be better spent
becoming competent with a good, general purpose language and then making
sure his or her work is completely documented as they move toward more
complex projects.  Concentrating on the minutiae of GUI interfaces and
related issues is highly likely to be wasted time.  Having a programming
language whose IDE helps the developer avoid mistakes and can track
versions is time invested in not losing time to those errors.

Bruce B.