Since I read about the guy who was surprised that anything other than SPAs exist (the full page reload magic incident), I realized there are way younger people in the field with no context or knowledge of CS history whatsoever, so some of them not knowing about Lazarus or Delphi sounds totally plausible.
I think it's not elitist at all to say that people with no CS education (whether academic, self taught, or acquired over time) should probably not be considered when writing documentation or release notes.
If you generate AI slop web dev code (and the chances are incredibly high if you haven't heard of Lisp or Delphi) you probably won't need Lazarus or care that native apps even exist.
I'm all for teaching and explaining, and I know a small percentage of new CS people are curious and interested, but... release notes aren't the place for helping them.
That said, an explanation of what Lazarus is is genuinely needed, because people who have written Delphi for years might not have heard it (thanks, Embarcadero). So your have a point beyond your main point there.
I know Delphi, yet I didn't know Lazarus until now. I'm sure there are others like me.
I can understand not wanting to explain Delphi, but come on, not everyone knows the name of every IDE for every language. It doesn't hurt to add one sentence explaining that. If I hadn't seen the comment above, I wouldn't be able to consider Lazarus in the future if I ever use Delphi again.
Given vc++ you would look for an open source version and land on gcc or clang, right? Or given windows you would check out what alternatives there are and learn a bit about linux, openbsd, and so on. At least that was my assumption. I think it is reasonable.
I mean sure, I can probably find Lazarus if searching for a Delphi IDE. But please explain: what's the advantage? They save a couple of bytes in storage for the forum post, and besides that, what do you get apart from a sense of elitism due to those outside of the ecosystem not getting much from the announcement post? I don't see anything besides gatekeeping.
Fewer people will know the project in the context it's meant to be used. That seems strictly negative. What's the positive?
Which is an excellent point for conversations, but in the context of the release notes in the website of the project, I understand that this xkcd principle does not apply.
If one goes to the release notes for Lazarus, they either sought those release notes out, and hence already know what it is. Or they were linked to it in a specific context, such as Hacker News, which the expectation of curiously clicking around to understand the project is natural.
Sometimes I click on HN submissions out of idle curiosity, not because I seek those out, or because I know what the link refers to.
It doesn't mean that I will actively try and navigate out of a forum completely separated [1] from the actual product site just to see what it is.
[1] It's the bane of nearly all projects, both commercial and open-source: blogs, release notes, discussions, forums and often even documentation don't have a single link back to the product page
> Delphi and Lazarus have been around for decades. It's like asking what lisp is.
No.
Everyone thinks their pet project is obvious and self-explanatory.
This is NEVER EVER a safe assumption. Remember that our entire industry is a mysterious black box to the outside world.
I worked for A Prominent North American Linux Vendor for a while. I was hired to work on the docs for one of their projects.
I'm an industry veteran with at that time over 25 years of broad cross-platform tech experience from CP/M to Linux to mainframes.
It took me a month of hard digging to get an extremely vague overall concept of what the product was and did.
Most of the company had no idea -- it's not Linux-related in any way -- and many of them regard the entire product platform as an evil to be expunged.
This is typical for that vendor. Aside from their Linux distro, ask for a tweet-length summary of any of their portfolio, expressed in general terms not specific to that product or vague marketing-ware, and nobody in the company can give it.
Nonetheless they are a multi-billion-dollar vendor.
Since I read about the guy who was surprised that anything other than SPAs exist (the full page reload magic incident), I realized there are way younger people in the field with no context or knowledge of CS history whatsoever, so some of them not knowing about Lazarus or Delphi sounds totally plausible.
> Since I read about the guy who was surprised that anything other than SPAs exist (the full page reload magic incident)
now you have referred to something I do not know about. Was it on HN or where?
yes it was on HN a couple weeks back, but I have a hard time finding it now, does anyone else remember some more details to find a match?
I think it's not elitist at all to say that people with no CS education (whether academic, self taught, or acquired over time) should probably not be considered when writing documentation or release notes.
If you generate AI slop web dev code (and the chances are incredibly high if you haven't heard of Lisp or Delphi) you probably won't need Lazarus or care that native apps even exist.
I'm all for teaching and explaining, and I know a small percentage of new CS people are curious and interested, but... release notes aren't the place for helping them.
That said, an explanation of what Lazarus is is genuinely needed, because people who have written Delphi for years might not have heard it (thanks, Embarcadero). So your have a point beyond your main point there.
You forget that every day, someone wakes up who is new to this planet.
And on that day their first priority is securing a good open source object Pascal compiler.
It was so much harder when I was a baby- you had to bootstrap the whole thing on an IBM 360.
I have also met people who have to ask what Lisp is. You might be surprised at how many people don't know things like this.
I know Delphi, yet I didn't know Lazarus until now. I'm sure there are others like me.
I can understand not wanting to explain Delphi, but come on, not everyone knows the name of every IDE for every language. It doesn't hurt to add one sentence explaining that. If I hadn't seen the comment above, I wouldn't be able to consider Lazarus in the future if I ever use Delphi again.
Given vc++ you would look for an open source version and land on gcc or clang, right? Or given windows you would check out what alternatives there are and learn a bit about linux, openbsd, and so on. At least that was my assumption. I think it is reasonable.
I mean sure, I can probably find Lazarus if searching for a Delphi IDE. But please explain: what's the advantage? They save a couple of bytes in storage for the forum post, and besides that, what do you get apart from a sense of elitism due to those outside of the ecosystem not getting much from the announcement post? I don't see anything besides gatekeeping.
Fewer people will know the project in the context it's meant to be used. That seems strictly negative. What's the positive?
5 replies →
10000 thousand people a day hear about any given topic for the first time in their life https://xkcd.com/1053/
Which is an excellent point for conversations, but in the context of the release notes in the website of the project, I understand that this xkcd principle does not apply.
If one goes to the release notes for Lazarus, they either sought those release notes out, and hence already know what it is. Or they were linked to it in a specific context, such as Hacker News, which the expectation of curiously clicking around to understand the project is natural.
Sometimes I click on HN submissions out of idle curiosity, not because I seek those out, or because I know what the link refers to.
It doesn't mean that I will actively try and navigate out of a forum completely separated [1] from the actual product site just to see what it is.
[1] It's the bane of nearly all projects, both commercial and open-source: blogs, release notes, discussions, forums and often even documentation don't have a single link back to the product page
> Delphi and Lazarus have been around for decades. It's like asking what lisp is.
No.
Everyone thinks their pet project is obvious and self-explanatory.
This is NEVER EVER a safe assumption. Remember that our entire industry is a mysterious black box to the outside world.
I worked for A Prominent North American Linux Vendor for a while. I was hired to work on the docs for one of their projects.
I'm an industry veteran with at that time over 25 years of broad cross-platform tech experience from CP/M to Linux to mainframes.
It took me a month of hard digging to get an extremely vague overall concept of what the product was and did.
Most of the company had no idea -- it's not Linux-related in any way -- and many of them regard the entire product platform as an evil to be expunged.
This is typical for that vendor. Aside from their Linux distro, ask for a tweet-length summary of any of their portfolio, expressed in general terms not specific to that product or vague marketing-ware, and nobody in the company can give it.
Nonetheless they are a multi-billion-dollar vendor.
But they only sell into established markets.
Uh... there are new people every day... about 10,000 of them:
https://xkcd.com/1053/