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Comment by webmobdev | Hacker News Reader

> but... it's written in Free Pascal. That's not a technology I want to deal with for what would be my #1 tool.

I didn't understand your point and would appreciate some more clarifications. For me, even if we ignore the fact that Pascal and its derivatives are 20+ year old mature languages, why does the programming language really matter if the tool built with it works to your satisfaction, and as intended?

In fact, Object Pascal (and not Pascal) with FreePascal + Lazarus IDE is actually a smart choice here as it allows you to develop multi-platform application easily with the same codebase. That is how CudaText is available for nearly all the popular platform (and even on some of the niche platforms e.g. xBSD OSes). Check out the open source Lazarus RAD IDE - https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ as it is a hidden gem for multi-platform development that not everyone is really aware of.

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> why does the programming language really matter if the tool built with it works to your satisfaction, and as intended?

Because the reason I'm looking to move away from ST4 is because I was disappointed with the features and pace/direction of development. I want an open source text editor that I can customize however I want (and possibly embed in my projects), so something written in a language I have no interest in and/or dislike isn't going to work for me.

Does Lua differ in that regard? Lua seems to be tolerated (as a necessary evil, for certain definitions of "necessary") more than it is actively enjoyed. Not obvious why Object Pascal wouldn't be viewed the same and couldn't be treated the same.

Pascal was a big part of my learning to program (Turbo Pascal). Current day opinion on Pascal is that it's a dead language without much of an ecosystem. It's just the harsh truth.

Lua ended up as a "DSL" in a ton of places for general scripting applications etc. When I say "DSL" I get that it's not, I'm just generalizing as to the type of solutions that I've personally seen Lua leveraged. With this sorta "Lua in random places" bit I feel lots of us have ran into it.

When comparing Pascal to Lua I would be more comfortable with Lua for a modern solution - I would posit that very little greenfield development is happening in Pascal. Lua continues to be present in-industry.

This entire comment is anecdotal and based on personal experience.

Pascal became Object Pascal. Delphi is a dialect of Object Pascal and descendent of Turbo Pascal, and still here.

There are multiple compilers and IDEs that use Object Pascal such as Oxygene (RemObjects), Free Pascal/Lazarus, PascalABC (open-source on GitHub), Smart Pascal, DWScript, etc...

By the way, Object Pascal is mostly an extension of Pascal, so in many cases a Pascal programmer can transfer their code to the newer compilers/IDEs. Free Pascal/Lazarus even has a Turbo Pascal compatibility mode (in addition to Delphi compatibility mode).

Object Pascal is often ranked between #15 to #20 on TIOBE (and that's without counting some dialects). Lua is presently ranked #39. So if somebody is talking about popularity or who is the dead language, then they should be saying that about Lua, Rust, Julia, Kotlin, Haskell, etc... Those are all languages ranked far below Object Pascal.

> I would posit that very little greenfield development is happening in Pascal

This is a very good example of the importance of the power of branding - Pascal has actually continued to evolve over the past 50+ years, and even has a few ISO standards, but most don't know about it because of the name changes:

Pascal -> Clascal (Pascal with object oriented extensions) -> Object Pascal (more OOP extensions)

Clascal and Object Pascal were developed in consultation with the original developer of Pascal, Niklaus Emil Wirth, and Object Pascal enjoyed considerable commercial success with Apple, Microsoft and Borland. Niklaus Wirth however has a bad habit of changing the name of every evolution of Pascal he himself works on, and so we have:

Pascal -> Modula / Modula 2 -> Oberon (with extensions we also have Oberon 02 and Active Oberon)

Oberon is powerful even for system programming, and the creator himself used it to create a new OS with same name as the programming language (yet again showcasing that he has no concept of branding and marketing) - http://www.projectoberon.com/ .

That makes sense - I didn't consider that you may want to change the code yourself.

Free Pascal tech slaps.

Honestly it crushes just about...well, everything. There's even a JS transpiler, it's lightning fast, and it's beautiful.

If you evaluate it on its technical merits, it absolutely stomps. The community is AWESOME too - people just making things because they want to, not because it's some resume padding fad framework BS, there's a lot of people who understand the actual concepts and will talk to you about them.

It is beautiful, and amazing. A 5-10MB executable, just like you had in 1998. Lightning fast. BGRABitmap and BGRAControls? STOMP. https://wiki.freepascal.org/BGRAControls#BGRAVirtualScreen

Oh, you can draw natively just like you would on an HTML5 canvas, but without the overhead of a browser? https://wiki.freepascal.org/BGRABitmap_tutorial_14

FreePascal/Lazrus are practically a hidden weapon.

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