Re: Euphoria isn't dying - just needs a jolly good kick!
- Posted by ryanj Nov 11, 2014
- 6546 views
The biggest mistake, in my opinion, of Euphoria developers, is to target the language to experienced programmers. i.e.: being not realistic.
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By ignoring young and not experience programmers - Euphoria actually blocked its future. Why can't you all understand it?
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Now that Euphoria 3 is mature, and Euphoria 4 is great - it's about time to invest effort on making it friendly. Those who criticized the importance of Euphoria IDE are blind and misleading. MS$ invested from QBASIC to "Visual Studio" billions because you cannot gain popularity by targeting your products to old users. Only the young users can make it. MS$ knows it.
I haven't really thought of it that way before, but you bring up some good points. I have always felt like the euphoria language itself is wonderful, but it is difficult to learn how to actually run, bind, translate, generate documentation from creole-syntax comments, etc. because of a lack of GUI-based tools. I understand many people (mostly Linux users) are used to command consoles and have no problem with them, but I find them quite intimidating.
<rant>Even though I have used computers since ~1990, starting with Commodore 128 BASIC and then QBASIC, I am STILL really bad at using the command console, on Windows or Linux. I hate typing commands! I can never seem to remember what commands to type, and what combination of -psandqs I'm supposed to type after them. And why should I have to type commands on a computer has a billion times more processing power required to display a stupid blinking cursor and sit there waiting for me to type something perfectly from memory instead doing the work for me in a fraction of a second with the click of the mouse!?</rant>
I understand the need to have a fall-back to command console sometimes, but a GUI is so much more intuitive, efficient, and easy to figure out how to use. People might be more interested in Euphoria if they could see that it has a complete graphical IDE that does everything we need:
- Write code with context-sensitive help
- Jump to file/line number of error
- Visually build GUI code
- Run, bind or translate program
- Edit icons to apply to exes
- Generate documentation from source creole-syntax comments
- Browse documentation within included source files
I'm not just bringing this up, expecting someone out there to do this some day...I am actually working on possible solution, but it will probably take a few more months to finish the first release.
