The Eighth Passenger, Stoned goto, etc
- Posted by Shian_Lee Mar 18, 2015
- 1742 views
I guess, in general, that before implementing a "must have" feature, such as the The Eighth Passenger (eval), or Stoned goto (Try/Catch/Fall), or Time is money (Pass-By-Reference), or the III Millennium (Object Oriented Programming), or any other "must have", it worth considering the following:
- Cost Vs Benefit. (i.e. time-effort-money-bugs-complications-broken_marriage Versus Is it that useful?).
- Simple Alternatives. (i.e. who said that recursive-function is better then an efficient-simple-easy-to-debug while loop?, etc.)
- How much need for it after all...? (i.e. so much work - but how many people and how many times will use it?)
- The overall affect on the Euphoria language itself. (i.e. some features are almost offering a new language-dialect... a totally new concept... or simply throws to the garbage bin decades of hard work and effort to keep the language consistent, simple, fast and efficient).
- Who, yes: Who, is going to deal with the extra bugs, documentation, tickets, cross-platform new release? (i.e. nobody likes to do these things, so: don't start something that nobody will finish. Not finished is equal to Not useful).
- Is this "must have" feature is a "must have" feature? (no comment). (yes comment: the fact that nobody on this forum resist to this "must have" feature, does not mean that so many people actually need it or want it or will ever use it. Most users might need absolutely other "features", such as bug-fixes, more examples in documentation, tutorials or improving an already existing routines).
There is more...
One thing which is different between commercial / open project is Strategy and Obligation to it.
But one thing is obvious, both commercial and open project will benefit from being realistic and not greedy.
P.S. 1024/128/64-Bit support, UTF-8, and such, are more like Cross-Platform support, so these are obvious and I don't mention it.
