[badsectoracula]

On one hand, Lazarus and Free Pascal are great so it is nice to see it being used as an introduction to programming.

On the other hand... Lazarus is way too complicated for someone's first foray into programming, IMO. The IDE throws at you a barrage of windows, buttons, lists, etc that can be almost as overwhelming as an airplane's cockpit :-P.

I always maintained that Free Pascal should either ditch the text mode IDE (outside of looking weird to anyone who didn't grew up with Turbo Pascal, almost no terminal/console works reliably enough for it and even in cases where it works, the IDE itself is very buggy - especially in the recent versions) and develop a simple GUI-based one akin to Turbo Pascal for Windows (ie. something that focuses only on small-sized programs) and have Lazarus as the "next step". Hell, it could even be based on Lazarus since most of its functionality is in the form of reusable components.

[zozbot234]

> I always maintained that Free Pascal should either ditch the text mode IDE

Why not fix the bugs instead? And it shouldn't look weird to anyone who has used TUI programs. In fact, we really should have support for these TUI features (stackable text windows, mouse-controlled menubar and widgets, context-sensitive status-bar) right inside emacs, or some other generic editor. They have stood the test of time wrt. intuitiveness and ergonomics, and it's weird that we still lack them in terminal-like environments.

[badsectoracula]

For the other reasons besides the bugs. I have used the text mode IDE a lot to write smaller programs and it is always a PITA (just not enough of a PITA to open Lazarus, create a brand new project, etc). And some of that is outside FP's control, like Linux terminal emulators being universally broken when it comes to complex shortcut keys that involve function keys and modifiers. Add to that the the Windows console window now also tries to behave more like a Linux terminal (though even before you still had to manually modify the shortcut to not create a 200 line buffer or whatever that causes the IDE to try and use all those lines as its 'screen' - which is especially annoying when it also decides to display a dialog, which is centered at that 'screen' and you have to scroll to see it, usually after pressing a few keys like Alt+F to open the menu and noticing that nothing happens) and you get even more issues.

Honestly the only environments where the FP seems to work (outside other bugs not related to the UI) is DOS and Linux's own console/terminal when running by itself without a window system.

In any case i submitted that message too quickly, that "either" part should have been followed with the alternative to keep it around as a fallback for the platforms where a GUI isn't available or in case someone wants it (though considering how broken it is, i doubt anyone is actually seriously using it).