OpenEuphoria

2. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by euphoric (admin) Jan 23, 2021
• 2878 views

I have been with this community since almost day one. I think my first version of Euphoria was 1.2. I still had the floppy disks until a few months ago, but I made sure to take pics of them before I tossed 'em. (I moved several states away and to a smaller residence, so I tried to downsize as much as possible... even trinkets and floppy disks.)

I have loved being here and appreciate the huge amounts of unpaid effort that has gone into both Euphoria and Phix.

With that said...

That's a tough one. I'm not sure how much Euphoria development is going on, but it's most likely being done, if at all, by Greg and Shawn. Greg does have an MVC project he's developing, and I suspect Euphoria will benefit from that. But as to which one a new person should use?

For hobbyist programming, playing with them both and deciding is probably the best path. However, Pete continues to develop Phix, and it's a great language to learn and use. n00bs can benefit from its ease-of-use, and advanced programmers can dig into more advanced concepts and paradigms. Now that there seems to be some Linux movement with Phix, that makes it even that much better.

I turned to Phix when I needed threads. (Turned out, there was a different (probably better) paradigm to pursue, but I didn't learn that till later. Regardless, I found my work with Phix to be useful and beneficial. And Pete is a very accommodating and capable programmer.)

There are some things that Phix does that I haven't yet fully grasped, but that's just a matter of time and learning. And Pete doesn't like namespaces (although, with the latest Class effort, maybe he's changing his mind), whereas I use them all the time. I'll give each namespace a new() (myLib:new()) if I want to, but Pete insists on a prefix (myLib_new()). However, Phix accommodates both tactics, so I'm not sure why I mentioned it, except to poke Pete about it.

Neither language is used by that many people, so that shouldn't even be a factor.

And the downward usage trend has been the case for a long while. I don't expect either language is growing from outside the community. If anything, people using Euphoria are switching to Phix because of its activity here (or using both when appropriate). I suspect the overall Eu/Phix community is shrinking, and the remaining population is shifting between the two or migrating to Phix. (I have absolutely no idea about numbers. I'm just assuming and guessing. The guys who run the web sites will know more about traffic.)

I think this is true (and definitely impressive, especially for a one man show!). Despite Greg's (and Shawn's?) excellent contributions and efforts, Euphoria is probably not going to see another version, and I'm not sure it can be competitive again in today's marketplace. I'm not sure what Euphoria's market is anymore.

Will Phix reach a version 1.0? I think Pete said that was going to happen soon... And I wouldn't be surprised to see Phix still being actively developed in a year or two. It all depends on where Pete wants to take it. What niche does he want to target? It would be interesting to see if Pete has a multi-year plan or if he's just taking it day by day.

The bright spots I see for Euphoria/Phix is Euphoria-MVC and Phix+GTK. But will more than 10 people use either? Again, that's something the makers can answer better than I.

I built a business with tools I developed using Euphoria, and I'll always be grateful for Rob Craig's (and then the community's) baby. It was awesome for my needs for several decades. But I'm migrating to other languages simply because there are other modern tools with great (e.g., superior) development environments that make RAD real.

For example, if Microsoft gives us the MAUI they prophesy, it's going to be hard to beat. That's a big if, but a huge reward if they accomplish what they set out to do!

4. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by petelomax Jan 23, 2021
• 2847 views
• Last edited Jan 25, 2021

True. Increased ambiguity, increased potential for mishap, resolving multiple instances within a component requires replicating the include structure, potential for help lookup to go wrong.
When namespaces are used for their original intended purpose, to resolve conflicts without having to modify 3rd party code, that's fine. Anything that threatens or weakens that is not a good idea.
The include system is subtly different between Euphoria and Phix, so you're just asking for trouble. If you can stomach myLib_new() over myLib:new(), you should. </rant>

I have retrospectively nominated 0.8.0 as the "1.0" moment, in my very biased opinion it (well, certainly 0.8.1) genuinely deserved it. The next release will be 1.0.3, or maybe 1.1

Yes I have a plan, and it's going quite well, but it's very ambitious and I'm not saying any more than that.

I've just counted 20 Phix users active in the last 12 months off the top of my head, still small but a definite increase on the year before.

Good luck with that! I had a little lookie, more than a touch of deja vu, and more than a little giggle, when they got to the obligatory "This button has been clicked 1 times" demo, superficially renamed as "Today I will add 18 lines of code", which is another good joke all by itself!

6. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by ghaberek (admin) Jan 23, 2021
• 2846 views

My best search shows May 1997, so that's close to 24 years. https://openeuphoria.org/forum/m/34528.wc. The earliest mailing list messages seem to be from around 1995-96.

MVC has been my focus because that's what scratches the biggest itch for me, as I have personal projects that can and will benefit from that.

I can confirm that forum activity has been declining steadily since 2015. I'll try to put together some numbers and charts.

While I don't want to believe this, I'll admit you may be correct. While I have a lot of ideas for how to move things forward and inject Euphoria back into the mainstream, I simply do not have the time to put in any significant effort toward that, and I find myself stymied by seemingly-trivial problems that I need to fix, but never do, and so the bigger things never even get started.

The only "RAD" tools I see in any mainstream langauges is command line utilities for bootstrapping and managing application packages. Things like composer or cargo or pip. They can help you manage dependencies, create new projects, run database migrations, etc. If what you want is a desktop GUI builder then friend, I think Visual Studio's WinForms designer is the last of a dying breed (hey, that sounds familiar). Modern applications are web-based and "serverless" and all that crap. (But I mean "crap" in a nice way.) Even modern desktop applications are still web-based, using Electron and whatnot.

-Greg

8. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by irv Jan 24, 2021
• 2820 views

To which you reply "Of course you wouldn't."

But to be honest, look at the 400+ programming languages represented on Rosettacode. A guess would be that half or more are in the same state as Euphoria, with few (perhaps only one) user remaining.

10. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by irv Jan 26, 2021
• 2720 views

duplicate post deleted

12. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by petelomax Jan 26, 2021
• 2734 views
• Last edited Jan 27, 2021

Indeed. We are fighting a downhill battle, and somehow still losing. In my mind there is one, and only one, gigantic stumbling block: running Euphoria/Phix in a browser, with a reasonable gui and some kind of file/database support. I am completely and utterly lost regarding the latter, perhaps wrongly I suspect you might think that is perhaps the easiest part?

Edit: ah, of course, I get it now, this would do it: http://www.tizag.com/ajaxTutorial/ajax-mysql-database.php
The obvious bit I missed is the response must be a string, so it is html or json, period. (Well, maybe more javascript, but let's just not go there.)

Absolutely. The world needs less people who run to their divorce lawyer the moment someone they fancy moves in next door
[just to be very clear, a broken/toxic/abusive relationship is a valid reason to end a marriage, dishy new neighbour ain't].

Do you just mean an excess of files in builtins that begin with a 'p'?
That [probably] started out as a way to have (a modified copy of) Euphoria's file.e and a Phix pfile.e both in the same builtins/ directory [or include/ as it probably was back then].
Not particularly very difficult to change, or even make "include pfile.e" issue "warning: that is now called file.e" before loading the right one and carrying on.
(Worryingly, I just found out my pfactors.e was apparently last modified 12th January 1882...)

You are not alone. Do you for some strange reason think that I find it easy? pHeap.e is a monster and I dread ever having to go back there...

Rhetorical riposte, which is weirder: (a) the strange shop where the staff somehow know the specific shelf on which the stuff they sell is suitably stacked, or, (b) the shocked shopper?

Working on wp made me realise for the first time just how truly awful the website really is. Suggestions and/or complaints warmly welcome.

14. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by euphoric (admin) Jan 26, 2021
• 2668 views

No, and for one reason: search.

Give me search, Pete!

16. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by euphoric (admin) Jan 26, 2021
• 2665 views

Oh, dang it! I forgot about that. From what I remember, the CHM help is really good.

18. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by petelomax Jan 26, 2021
• 2634 views

OK, thinking laterally and out loud, I have been married to the chm format for a long time now, but maybe for all the wrong reasons.

In theory, it really should not be all that difficult to craft a standalone Phix program that behaves much like a chm file, only even better.

Then we could really go to town, have a "[]beginner []intermediate []advanced" radio group, a proper and even better full-text search (with history), the possibilities are endless.

It won't happen overnight, I will need help, it will need most of the steps to be automated, and it may take us into next year or even the year after...

20. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by euphoric (admin) Jan 27, 2021
• 2636 views

Click the "manual" tab. Then use the search box in the upper right.

Yes, now I remember! It's been a while that I've been able to use Eu/Phix, unfortunately.

Yeah, the search isn't good. I've been frustrated by it many times.

It's not! I retract my prior false statements!

22. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by irv Jan 29, 2021
• 2566 views

A clone of Euphoria, nothing more?

Sorry, I disagree.

What I see is a more efficient and more versatile implementation of the Euphoria concept, with the addition of things people have been asking for over the years, but never got.

What about structures and classes? These are very useful, no version of Eu has them. Try/catch?

What about compiling large programs in less than 1 second? Phix does, Euphoria has always been slow, and later versions are extremely slow.

As for "There are registered users of Euphoria 2.5 and earlier in 67 countries!" - that's completely irrelevant. Most of those long ago moved to other languages (or died of old age).

"Where are the registered users of Eu or Phix?" There is no register!

I do agree that Eu 2.x and 3.x are simple and stable. The problem is, people in this century expect complex programs. Complex programs can be written in a simple language (with a great deal of wasted effort).

It's also possible to build a car, starting out with re-inventing the wheel. It's generally more productive and less risky to just use existing wheels and other parts rather than designing, building, and testing your own.

If Elon Musk had said "I'm going to make an electric car", and started by building a plant to manufacture rubber for the tires, he would be broke by now.

24. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by katsmeow Jan 29, 2021
• 2532 views
• Last edited Feb 04, 2021

[deleted]

26. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by katsmeow Jan 30, 2021
• 2489 views
• Last edited Feb 04, 2021

[deleted]

28. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by ghaberek (admin) Jan 30, 2021
• 2490 views

I literally never said this. And this summary of my statement couldn't be more untrue. I want to see a lot more things come to Euphoria. I want Euphoria to be a mainstream, fully-featured, stable and competent competitor to any other popular language available today. In fact, I am pretty sure I started my response to this thread with that same sentiment:

I think you've misinterpreted my "dialect" analogy. Spoken languages grow and evolve over time. Sometimes they branch off of each other to create new languages. Sometimes they die off with the people and cultures that used them. Regardless, the life cycle of any language is a thing that exists in the world, good, bad, or indifferent. And programming languages are really no different than that, except that they often live and die much faster than spoken languges.

I have great aspirations and I am inclined to believe everyone else here aspires for great things as well. My failure to continue moving this project forward are not for want of aspirations. I like the features that Pete is implementing in Phix. Things I'd like to see in Euphoria include threads, classes, and a built in compiler, all of which Phix now has. But I have entirely different ideas on how they should behave or be implemented within Euphoria itself and Pete's heavy use of Assembly language make porting those things back to Euphoria almost entirely impossible, at least for me.

I do plenty of "computering" elsewhere but unfortunately I find myself in a continuous Catch-22 paradox: I cannot use Euphoria for my work projects because it is not modern enough for those purposes, and I have not been able to bring Euphoria up to speed due to my continued effort on my work projects. What's kind of sad and ironic is that most of my work projects use WinForms, which itself is now considered to be "outdated" by more "modern" developers that I encounter.

I completely disagree with this statement. Firstly, because data munging hasn't really changed in the entire history of electronic computing. Aside from other branches of computer science like quantum computing and machine learning, all the data we ever process is still just some series of bytes and bits and I think Euphoria is still very well suited to that type of work. And second, because I have recently implemented several new tools for processing "modern" forms of data, such as my JSON, HTML, and template parsers. And I apologize if I have not communicated this enough recently, so I'll say it again: Euphoria MVC is mostly a testbed for features that I would like to eventually move to the Euphoria standard library.

-Greg

30. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by petelomax Jan 30, 2021
• 2432 views

[deleted]

32. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by irv Jan 31, 2021
• 2383 views
• Last edited Feb 02, 2021

What you say is completely true. 3.1 is small, stable, versatile, and easy to learn.

That doesn't mean it can attract newcomers. The phrase: "they don't know what they don't know" - applies here. Programming is hard. They expect it to be easy.

The problem is, people are turned off by text-mode programs (that's so last-century), and when they learn the difficulties involved with creating a modern-looking program with Euphoria (or Phix), they go elsewhere.

(Only to find out that programming is still hard!)

34. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by GreenEuphorian Feb 02, 2021
• 2342 views

Please, post it here because we are all interested.

36. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by katsmeow Feb 02, 2021
• 2318 views

That's metadata about the [deleted] tag. Thanks a bunch.

Kat

38. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by katsmeow Feb 04, 2021
• 2233 views

I would like to decline. I feel each suggestion will start a new separate flame war, gradually growing more personal. This is historically how Euphorum works. Pete is already posting [deleted] , so i went back and [deleted] a post or two of mine. Suggestions cause bad feelings.

Kat

40. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by katsmeow Feb 05, 2021
• 2179 views

Most of my posts for years were deleted, so i see you posting [deleted] , i don't see humor. And i don't see humor in OE losing userbase. And i didn't think asking for additional info to be wierd. Obviously then this forum is in a different mind-space than i am, and i have nothing to contribute in your mind-space.

Kat

42. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Feb 07, 2021
• 2145 views

Seconded.

44. Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?

• Posted by CraigWelch Feb 09, 2021
• 2109 views

For quite a few years now, the only GUI I've used has been the browser. You can make it do anything you want. My setup is:

I design and build the webpage(s) using Webix. It provides full HTML / Javascript / Ajax functionality. On the server are a number of 'helper' Euphoria programs. For example, to populate a dropdown menu with all of the .EDB databases, the Ajax call is to DB_list.eui. This will just ls *.edb > DB_list.txt. DB_list.eui then reads DB_list.txt and sends it back as output.

-- This program lists the 'edb' databases, and outputs them for a richedit control selection 
 
system_exec("ls -t *.edb > edb.txt" , 0) 
sList = read_lines("edb.txt") 
 
sBuffer = "[  \n" 
 
for i = 1 to length(sList) do 
	if i = length(sList) then 
		sBuffer = sBuffer & "{ \"id\":" & sprintf("%d",i) & ", \"value\":\""   &  sList[i]   &  "\"} \n" 
	else 
		sBuffer = sBuffer & "{ \"id\":" & sprintf("%d",i) & ", \"value\":\""   &  sList[i]   &  "\"}, \n" 
	end if 
end for 
 
sBuffer = sBuffer & "]\n" 
 
puts(1,"Content-type: application/json\n\n\n") 
puts(1, sBuffer) 
 

The calling Javascript is, clearly, expecting a Javascript response. Partial code:

webix.ui({ 
					rows: 
					[ 
					{height:10}, 
					{view:"fieldset", label:"Database Maintenance", height:80,css:"odd", 
					body:{ padding:2,//defining Fieldset body 
							rows:[ 
										{		cols:[ 
							                		{view:"richselect", id:"Database", options:"./find_database_names.eui", width:200, value:1}, 
							                		{}, 
				     								{view:"richselect", id:"Table", value:"Tables", options:"./greys_utilities.eui",width:200}, 
				     								{}, 
				     								{view:"template", id:"Entries_count", template:"entries",width:110, height:20}, 
				     								{}, 
				     								{view:"richselect", id:"Action", width:200, value:1, 
						     							options:[ 
												             { "id":1, "value":"Create_DB"}, 
												             { "id":2, "value":"Compact_DB"}, 
												             { "id":3, "value":"Add_Table"}, 
												             { "id":4, "value":"Delete_Table"}, 
												             { "id":5, "value":"Merge_Tables"}, 
												       		 { "id":6, "value":"Shrink_Fields"} 
										    							]}, 
 

A given application will have several of these helpers, for reading databases, processing data, etc. They're usually quite small and easy to write.

As for databases, I use the Euphoria database exclusively. I have never had the problems that others seem to have had, perhaps because I use a functional locking system to avoid conflicts.

For debugging, I have a few terminal tabs open, with (for example) 'tail -f /var/log/apache2/access log' (or error.log). Error messages are printed to STDERR, so that they show up in the Apache logs.

The development environment includes a webpage that shows the latest ex.err, and of course the formatted version using Antonio Alessi's program. It also shows the latest Apache errors. See screenshots.

I ensure that all programs can be run from the command line as well as calling them by url, even though they will, with clean code, crash because of lack of input (which would be provided in the calling url). Whenever any code changes are made, the command line invocation will show any syntax errors, which are difficult to troubleshoot otherwise. If all is OK, run it from the browser, check the dump if there's a fatal error, and check (as above) the error logs in real time to show any trouble-shooting messages.

This might not suit everyone, but it works well for me. Happy to answer any questions about the workflow.