Delphi or Lazarus/Free Pascal

[Stano 143]

Every time I see your name, I look forward to a long post. I honestly mean it as a compliment.

[Fr0sT.Brutal 900]

1 hour ago, Stano said:

long post

...with historical excursus 🙂

[Stano 143]

1 minute ago, Fr0sT.Brutal said:

...with historical excursus 🙂

And I like that. It's years of experience.

[David Schwartz 426]

17 hours ago, Stano said:

Every time I see your name, I look forward to a long post. I honestly mean it as a compliment.

 

I was diagnosed with Asperger's last year and it explains a whole lot of strange things going back to childhood. One is that I tend to be very wordy. I cannot comprehend how folks can say anything useful in ten words or less.

 

For most of my life, I just avoided saying much because I'd get so much crap for it. But since being diagnosed, I've come to embrace it. Yes, there will always be people who get annoyed. I envy them for their ability to be brief.

 

A common complaint I've heard over the years is something including the words "over-analyzing" or "over-thinking" things.

 

Asperger's is said to be a form of autism, and one thing that characterizes the autistic brain is we tend to be dealing with 10x or more stimuli coming into our brain at any given moment that most other folks. Here's an analogy:

 

In baseball, you can be standing at the plate, and for most people at bat, they just see the pitcher, the wind-up, and then a ball coming at them. They can focus in and just see the ball. And they have to make a decision when the ball is about 1/4 of the way towards them whether to swing at it or not.

 

I see the ball, the pitcher, the second baseman slapping his glove, the short-stop stepping sideways, the left and right fielders getting ready, the 3rd-baseman, the 3rd-base coach signaling the guy on 2nd base, the birds flying at the lights, some people in the stands jumping around and waving, and I hear all of the noises behind me and coming from the dugouts. Sometimes it's a wonder I can even swing the bat before the ball is in the catcher's mitt. I loved basball as a kid; I played left field, and I could stop anything coming at me. But I could never hit the ball worth a darn, so the coach would only put me in on the 7th inning.

 

When I hear those words, "over-analysing" and "over-thinking", it reminds me that most people have brains that allow them to just focus on the pitcher and the ball, without all of that other crap distracting them. For THEM, they'd have to think long and hard to be present to even a fraction of the "noise" that floods into my head every waking moment of my life. For THEM, it WOULD take a LOT of analysis and thought!

 

For me, it's just what's there when I look at ANYTHING. 

 

It's like ... human beings have a "squelch" control in our brains that's set to only allow the strongest and most intense signals come through to our brains. 

 

But people on the autism spectrum have that squelch control turned down so we get a lot more noise along with the signals we're looking for. And we have to process all of that crap in real-time just to stay focused on whatever it is we're trying to deal with. People on the so-called "lower-functioning" end of the spectrum have it turned WAY down, to the point where they can't talk or control their muscles well due to the constant overload of signals coming into their brain. At least, that's one of the latest theories. It seems to capture some of the dynamics involved, anyway.

 

It's a big plus in the software field because it helps me be a great architect -- I naturally see things from a birds-eye view, and often with far more breadth, depth, and detail than most other folks. Of course, they all think I'm off my rocker and say things like, "Earth to Schwartz ... come on back to the meeting!" I cannot tell you how many problems I've seen over the years that nobody wanted to talk about that later on came back to cause major problems.

 

It's both a gift and a curse. It's just how my brain works.

 

Edited September 21, 2022 by David Schwartz

[FaFaFooey 6]

20 hours ago, Fr0sT.Brutal said:

Okay, built FPC/Laz from trunk. Started debugging.

Goodbye.

This is from the developer working on FpDebug: " An no, but I don't have any updates on "properties". I know that work is done on it, and that it is hoped to come whit fpc 3.4.0 - whenever that is. "  I do use OutputDebugString and DebugView++ a lot.

[pcoder 4]

This is symptomatic of the FPC project. The regular developer of the debugger belongs to the Lazarus (IDE) project;

he is very good, but he needs support (eg DWARF information) from the FPC developers. The weak link in the Lazarus/FPC suite is FPC.

[Fr0sT.Brutal 900]

2 hours ago, FaFaFooey said:

This is from the developer working on FpDebug: " An no, but I don't have any updates on "properties". I know that work is done on it, and that it is hoped to come whit fpc 3.4.0 - whenever that is. "  I do use OutputDebugString and DebugView++ a lot.

I understand all of the circumstances - project is free, nobody obliges anything, devs work at it in their spare time and so on. Just mentioning the result. I had experience working with a project of moderate size (PasDoc) in Lazarus and the experience was OK but debugger just drove me sad.

[Stano 143]

2 hours ago, David Schwartz said:

I was diagnosed with Asperger's last year and

OT: thanks to this syndrome, we have such people as, for example
Newton
Einstein
Bill Gates
Where would we be today without this syndrome?

[Pat Foley 51]

On 9/20/2022 at 5:22 AM, David Schwartz said:

The bottom-line is ... Management sticks with what they know.

 

"No one ever got fired" for buying IBM was an adage from 80's when trying to sell a local solution.  I spent most of my life operating machines at small power plant.  Only during blackouts operators discussed restart. Otherwise it was being a snipe (swiper of bilge tanks) on Navy flagship.  I was able to get "insight" into how the thing worked by using excel models.  Later I developed an EAP not Employee Assistance Program but an Emergency Action Plan when at beginning of each shift discussing the actions to do when something happened to avoid blackout or injury. Which didn't sell to Manager who mentioned "many operators uncomfortable running in manual."  I been working on generic simulator, using Delphi coding to build app with scenarios passing on how to handle events system wide or locally.   

 

The Delphi maintenance fee is like buying insurance to keep the language current to new advances and maintain good will by promoting Delphi.  

 

I am thinking to buy TMS web core and try on both D and L

 

MSEdge has some tools to help Lazarus JSscript builds.  This is debugging the  Asyncdemo in Lazarus pastojs/Demos. Invoked by simply right clicking in browser F12 helps. 

    

[Milo G 0]

On 9/5/2022 at 8:02 AM, Rinzwind said:

How would you compare Delphi to the offerings of Free Pascal and Lazarus? Anyone has real experience with using both? Why not use Free Pascal exclusively? Or is it lacking in some areas? Or you only use Delphi for old projects, and would choose Lazarus for new ones?

 

Just curious to what the state is of both as viewed by 'expert' Pascal programmers. Please only reply if you have indeed a decent amount of experience in using both.

 

One would think Delphi would have the better code editor/code writing help? But I am somehow doubting that. Someone can assure me? 😉

I am no expert and use them both.

It's good to have Free Pascal with Lazarus as an free option, it's  Object Pascal syntax that works.

Compared to Delphi they lack component support - as you probably now.

Regards