Free Pascal: What happened to the track?

My guess is that Delphi didn’t leave room for Free Pascal. But Delphi seems unfriendly to Linux and editors like Vim and Emacs.

Is Free Pascal Track not worth it, or perhaps it just needs help?

It looks like the track hasn’t had work in over a year. I’m not seeing anything about it on the forum about it. I suspect this can be considered unmaintained and open for someone to volunteer to build out.

It seems this track it’s more about Lazarus IDE. I was thinking in something more simple as just use a fpc to run the exercises like old pascal compilers on class lessons about programming in old days.

Given that the track appears unlaunched and abandoned, I suspect @iHiD would be happy to have it reworked and launched however makes sense to whomever would be interested in making that happen :slight_smile:

At first, I was interested in trying to help the trail because Pascal is a very important language, it’s a good entry point to learn programming and you can go much further than that if you want and/or need to. But I’m not interested in IDEs, RADs etc. IMHO, they are good to boost production and emphasize best practices but not really good to learn to code, the raw tools are better to do this job :grin:; i think fpc is the best option for a track named free-pascal but looks like I’m alone.

My pascal code skills are rusty and start something from scratch will be a big effort. If possible, I would like to see some feedback about the “free-pascal resurrection”, It there people interested in started something far more simple or if the Lazarus is the real best fit, also if there are more people interested in help (admin and mentor for example). (But I’m not interested in Lazarus nor Delphi).

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I don’t see anyone saying Lazarus IDE must be used. Exercism tracks are about the language, not the tooling. If fpc can be easily used by the students, then it might be appropriate to use that instead. You might need to redo some of the existing work to make it compatible with the new approach, but the track isn’t too far along.

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Or just start over from scratch :smile:

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New Track | Exercism's Docs covers what needs to be done to build a new track. From experience, people will gladly answer specific questions and give advice when requested. As for your Pascal skills, if you see this through to launch, I’m sure they won’t be rusty by the end. Good luck!

My reply to last year’s post was too hasty. We could retire the Delphi track when a Free Pascal track launches.

If existing Delphi exercises can carry across, then the existing authors/contributors can be credited, just as Minesweeper authors/contributors have been credited in Flower Field exercises.

We rarely retire tracks. It’s only happened twice in recent years.

For PLSQL, it was unmaintained and needed a lot of work to update the track’s test runner. However, Delphi is currently maintained and generally stable.

For ClojureScript, it was retired because it was identical to Clojure except for a different compiler backend (JavaScript instead of Java). I could submit my Clojure solutions as-is to ClojureScript exercises and pass. Delphi and Free Pascal don’t seem that closely interchangeable.

Indeed, I use Vim even for Pharo, and that is very much a language that has advantages for using the tooling that it has for it. But when it comes to coding, I still use Vim.

The tooling used for writing in the language should really not be the focus. Not necessarily ignored, but not the focus.

This is not necessarily replied to in the intended thread. Sorry about that.