Re: Happy Birthday to Euphoria 4.1.0
- Posted by dcuny Feb 02, 2015
- 1458 views
I know I've been incredibly busy IRL...
Well, real life always trumps other things, I understand that! 
Although I've been heavily active in Euphoria in the past, being out of the loop makes me a newbie in a lot of things, and that's one of the reasons I've been posting detailed stories.
For example, I'd gotten instructions that I could just drop the bin directory of 4.1.0 into the current directory of Euphoria, and everything would just work. However, that's not the case - the syntax coloring routines have been changed, and ed breaks if you do that.
I have a feeling that Euphoria attracts people who enjoy building things from scratch. The Not Invented Here folk. I certainly fall into that camp.
But the truth is, Euphoria is lacking in some really basic things.
Back in the day, Euphoria had at least minimal support for graphics. But since screen graphics were deprecated, they've been pulled from OpenEuphoria.
Only... all the related support routines were pulled from OpenEuphoria. Without pixel() and get_pixel() a ton of useful graphics code on the RDS site is also broken, since they rely on them.
Natively, Euphoria doesn't even have a way to draw a line, or even set a pixel.
Why leave read_bitmap() and save_bitmap() in without providing any tools for working with them? Neither the image or the palette format is documented.
I ended up writing a safe version of set_bitmap_pixel() and added my own implementation of set_bitmap_text(), creating a partial font set from scratch. Because after downloading a couple of broken libraries from RDS, I figured it was easier to build it from scratch than to try fixing some someone else's code. That meant a couple hours of productivity lost when I could have been working on my main program.
My point: I believe anyone other than a "power" user would have simply decided that Euphoria lacked basic tools that any other language provides, and looked for a better tool.
The idea that developers are running their own (fixed) versions of the 4.1.0 beta without releasing early and often makes me think that Euphoria development has slipped into a similar rut.
And I know: frequent releases also need documentation, and require a lot of time an effort. Been there, done that.
- David
