OpenEuphoria

2. Re: Minimalism and Euphoria

• Posted by bugmagnet Sep 27, 2014
• 2719 views

Can you point us to a definition of minimalist? Do you mean languages with the fewest reserved words (see also Wikipedia)? Or do you have something else in mind?

Bugmagnet

4. Re: Minimalism and Euphoria

• Posted by Slacker Oct 21, 2014
• 2478 views

Minimalism is the main reason I like Eu so much. I've been using it since 2000 and have yet to see a programming language which better suits the needs of the casual programmer. This changed somewhat with the eu 4, which is why I'm still using 3.1.1.

6. Re: Minimalism and Euphoria

• Posted by Spock Oct 21, 2014
• 2410 views

I use Euphoria a lOT at work (a shipping company) for various data conversion utilities. I wanted to use the latest 4.x but the start up is just so _slow_. On my new laptop it would take 20 seconds just to run a win32 (not Winlib32) app. So I am using the euiw.exe dated from Dec 2010 (4.0.0). With it I get 2 seconds.

I dread to think how slow an equivalent Win32lib app would be, even worse for our users that have old computers - perhaps upwards of 2 minutes?

What happened, guys?

Spock

8. Re: Minimalism and Euphoria

• Posted by Slacker Oct 22, 2014
• 2370 views

I know there were quite a few unhappy euphoria programmers when Rob Craig handed over the reins to the new development team. I found early versions of Eu 4 slow to start up (as far as I know, that's still the case), buggy, and the size of an executable was huge in comparison to Eu 3 exes (3Mb for "hello world").

There didn't seem to be much thought put into the development process. It started off with the intention of providing a standard library, all well and good (although what was wrong with Ricardo Forno's General Functions?), but then all kinds of control structures were added like Goto, Switch, etc without any consideration of whether these features were needed or not (they weren't). Apparently the guiding principle was simply "more is better".

I'm sure there are lots of happy Eu 4 programmers out there now, but probably a significantly number of "old-timers" like me who stuck with the older versions.

I must admit I never really understood the philosophy that a programming language has to be in continual development for it to "survive". Maintenance/bug fixes, sure, and perhaps things like conversion to 64 bit, but anything else is just feature creep and changes the fundamental nature of the language and its intended niche.

The size of the documentation of Eu 4 is huge in comparison with Eu 3, and much more technical. Rob's vision was "Just Say no to complicated programming languages", but in my view, it seems that the devs lost sight of that imperative.

My two cents.

10. Re: Minimalism and Euphoria

• Posted by AndyDrummond Oct 24, 2014
• 2305 views

I'm one of those who still like the old Euphoria 3. I use Judith Evans' IDE almost exclusively, and what I love about the whole thing is that I can write a dead simple program for some silly job or do some complex emulation job, and when I press f5 - it runs. Instantly. No hangups, just runs. Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8.1 (grr) and Windows 10 alpha. Just works. I do it rarely enough that I don't remember all the options and syntax rules in Eu4, but to compensate I have to put up with having main() as the last function and occasional namespace funnies in Eu3. I want to get away from all the code involved in making a program work, I just want to write my code and have it run. It's fabulous.

As an aside, Judith never really finished cleaning up the IDE; she went down with dementia soon after stopping work on it, and I have to say I'm not even sure she's alive. Her husband Archie has not replied to my emails recently. But the IDE, once you get used to some of its funnies, is extremely useful. Am I the only user of it?

12. Re: Minimalism and Euphoria

• Posted by ChrisB (moderator) Oct 30, 2014
• 1973 views

Hi

so you would like to replace

for I = 1 to 100 do 
      Do stuff 
end for 

With

I = 1 
while 1 do 
     Do stuff 
     I += 1 (or other) 
     If I = 100 then exit end if 
end while 

rather than giving people the choice?

Doesn't seemto enhance the language.

Chris

14. Re: Minimalism and Euphoria

• Posted by jaygade Oct 30, 2014
• 1949 views

I think that point is that Euphoria folklore states that Rob C wanted only "while" loops in Euphoria in very early versions. That was certainly prior to Euphoria 1.4 when I started using it. Very few people wanted the language to be that minimalist though, and lobbied for including "for" loops.

cf., Google's Go language has only "for" loops, although they are still very flexible.

-- canonically 
integer i = 1 
while i <= 10 do 
  -- Do Stuff 
  ? i 
  i = i+1 
end while 

16. Re: Minimalism and Euphoria

• Posted by ChrisB (moderator) Nov 01, 2014
• 1834 views

HI Derek

You are of course absolutely right, I tend to use for loops where I know how the progression will be, and infinite while loops with exits where I don't, so that was just laziness on my part.

incidentally my first prgram was on a commodore pet,

10 print "hello" 
20 goto 10 

I didn't know how to stop it, so panicked and turned the computer off!

I would probably have to do the same with your example too

Chris

18. Re: Minimalism and Euphoria

• Posted by SDPringle Nov 02, 2014
• 1790 views

for I = 1 to 100 do 
      Do stuff 
end for 

I = 1 
while 1 do 
     Do stuff 
     I += 1 (or other) 
     If I = 100 then exit end if 
end while 

I was playing a kind of devil's advocate here in asking whether we should get rid of 'for'. Sometimes it is better to describe what one is advocating instead of arguing against it. A minimal language would be a an aseembler of a virtual computer of the following type OISC : [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer]. In this link you can download one. There are some emulators at the end of the web page.

SDPringle