Comment by Timon3
1 month ago
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?
I thought the upside was pretty obvious, but perhaps there is such an age and culture gap that it has to be said out loud: I'm all for people exercising (and thus, strengthening) their research and patience skills. And complaining about how not every post on HN is a pretty landing page pitching a product is a spit in the face of that. Some communities don't attract people like this and rightly so. I grew up in a RTFM & RTFS culture (and it was awesome!), so perhaps we might never reconcile our differences.
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