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

[Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP>]

On 2013-08-27, Yannick Duchêne <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> wrote:
> Le Tue, 27 Aug 2013 18:50:20 +0200, Simon Clubley  
><clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-earth.ufp> a écrit:
>>
>> The problem is that the good support is more important to some learners
>> than a technically better language.
>>
>> I've had a look at the Free Pascal support channels in the past and they
>> appear to be very friendly (for the most part) and understanding of what
>> a person wants to achieve.
>
> On that precise point, my personal experience gave me an opposite feeling.  
> I remember I've re?opened a bug report two times (before I gave up). This  
> was something the documentation said, and the compiler did something else,  
> and that was on a topic as important as visibility of object methods. I  
> opened a bug report saying either the compiler must implement the  
> ?specification? as stated in the documentation, or the documentation must  
> be updated to match what the compiler do. The answer I get was that none  
> of the two will be done and the report was closed immediately. As this was  
> looking totally silly to me and could not believe it, I reopened it two  
> times, with some insistence to repeat either the documentation had to be  
> updated or the compiler fixed, and asking if it was really necessary to  
> fork FPK (they did not enjoyed this sentence) to get a compiler doing what  
> the documentation says, with same result.
>
> Not friendly at all and no understanding neither, and to me, it was not  
> serious.
>

It's amazing how perceptions can be so different. :-)

However, my comments about the other things stands. For example, there
was some recent discussion about people wanting to run Ada on the small
embedded battery powered ARM boards and some people kept suggesting (for
example) large PC-104 sized mains powered x86 boards and (relatively)
large expensive I/O interfaces instead of addressing the hobbyist's
_actual_ needs.

That is just so out of touch with what the typical embedded hobbyist is
doing these days, it's hard to know where to begin and if a hobbyist sees
responses like the above and then compares it to the typical responses
seen in other places, which actually understand the hobbyist's needs,
which language do you think they are going to choose ?

I admit the following statement is harder to define, but I still feel
there is a overall elitist style feel to comp.lang.ada at times which
is not compatible with presenting a warm welcoming feeling to newcomers
thinking of trying Ada for the first time.

> That's precisely this incident (a big one to me at that time), which made  
> me seek for another option. I learned about Oberon (the language and the  
> OS), Modula (misc variants), and Ada, which I already knew in the past but  
> I did not understood at the moment. I finally decided to choose Ada,  
> because Oberon and Modula looked dead to me and because of the existence  
> of an ISO standard.
>

I've gone through this whole process myself, looking for other Wirth
type languages and I keep coming back to Ada. As you say, Modula {2|3}
appears to be dead and while Oberon is still a basis for language
experiments in various forms, no Oberon variant seems to have gathered a
sufficient criticial mass yet to attract people (and hence development)
to it on a ongoing basis.

I keep thinking about Free Pascal but still prefer Ada to it.

But I still wish there were more viable Wirth language options available.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world