Re: Euphoria's strong and weak points?
- Posted by ghaberek (admin) May 16, 2014
- 2085 views
Clarity and readability have always been Euphoria's strong points. I can think of few other languages that are as readable (or maybe that's just experience).
This has always been my favorite point about Euphoria. The code may be verbose (which can be bad I guess), but it is [almost always] incredibly easy to read and comprehend compared to many other languages. I think a lot of people get thrown off by more advanced features like pointers and dereferencing. If you don't know the difference between (int, int*, and int[]) then you will be in trouble using a lot of major languages.
I think that speed has become less important as a selling point. For most tasks, computers are "fast enough" regardless of what language you use.
While true, Euphoria is still much faster than many other languages, especially when you factor in the "speed" of development. It's not so easy to "hit the ground running" with languages like C/C++ or Java. Alternatively, Euphoria does not really scale well to big projects like those languages do.
Being able to bind or compile Euphoria projects to a standalone executable with no runtime or other packages to download is still a strength.
This is, unfortunately, only true for some aspects of Euphoria. wxEuphoria, for instance, requires several external libraries to be bundled with the executable. I would like to see a statically-linked wxEuphoria interpreter (I think Matt had worked on that along with OOEU) but doing so would be incredibly complicated and severely bloat the interpreter size by at least 20MB.
I'm not sure on weak points. Having a REPL would be nice, but I think that's being worked on.
REPL, OOP, exceptions, eval(), reflection. Many "modern" languages have these features and I think a lot of people get turned off by Euphoria's lack of bells and whistles.
-Greg
