Re: Getting to a release, an interim update, and why this is so hard
- Posted by ghaberek (admin) Aug 27, 2019
- 1137 views
We have (had) a good version 4.5 or 4.6 a purely function programming language. What was needed was very accurate connections and wrappers to various dlls in C and keeping them current.
Yes, I agree. Down the road I'd like to have some sort of package management solution to keep this all organized and up to date. Adding support for things like JSON, XML, HTTPS, and other web technologies should help with this effort, so I believe those should come first.
There was and is no need for OOP.
Need? No, I suppose we don't need OOP features. But if we want to draw in more users and developers, and if we want to have access to a wider range of platforms and frameworks, I think adding OOP features would help. Wrapping wxWidgets, for instance, would be a lot easier if we had traditional classes/methods/inheritance/etc.
I will draw your attention to these articles.
https://dpc.pw/the-faster-you-unlearn-oop-the-better-for-you-and-your-software
https://medium.com/better-programming/object-oriented-programming-the-trillion-dollar-disaster-92a4b666c7c7
Eh, a lot of times opponents to OOP are just fear-mongering and blowing smoke in order to promote functional programing, which I think is wholly worse than OOP. I agree that procedural programing, like Euphoria, seems to be the best route for well organized, modular, and maintainable programs. But I also think that Euphoria-with-classes would help extend that organization and modularity, and when used well, decrease complexity.
What is needed is consolidating many includes into single includes and just have 4-8 includes. They were originally designed for lower strength and lower memory computers, and have no real validly in the modern computers with Windows 10 and similar powerful Linux distros.
I don't disagree that the standard library could use some organization, but I'm not sure I agree about the number of separate includes. I don't think they were ever organized to reduce their size or due to any concerns about memory or other constraints. They're organized categorically. I think that the number of includes is going to scale in proportion to the number of features it provides. Look at other languages with even larger standard libraries, like Python, Lua, or Ruby. They're huge but they're assisted by the benefit of package management. What I'd also like to see is either a "did you mean this?" feature in the interpreter, or maybe Pete's approach in Phix where he auto-includes a lot of things.
The whole world has also moved towards the Android operating system. Why not concentrate on Androids as well?
This comes up a lot and I'm entirely for supporting more platforms, especially popular ones. You could build and run Euphoria on Android right now. But can you do anything with it? In order to make Euphoria useful on Android, we need a way to hook into the larger framework, which is very difficult outside of the Java/Kotlin environment Android uses. It's not impossible. Xamrin somehow manages to convert C# to Android (Java/Kotlin) and iOS (Objective-C/Swift) but it does so at many costs and with additional complexity.
Outside of North America and Europe, there is a whole world of poorer people who have taken to the Raspberry PI and similar. For example, the Pi is used for teaching primary and secondary school students in Kerala (population 35 million)
I'm already committed to supporting the Raspberry Pi. As I've said, I've got several on hand to test. 1A, 3B, a few Zeros, a Zero W, and I'll probably get a 4 soon enough. I can provide Android builds as well, but they won't be usable for graphical apps until we can solve the problems I mentioned above.
-Greg
