Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?
- Posted by euphoric (admin) Jan 23, 2021
- 2604 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...
...a total newcomer would want to know which of the two languages they had better investing their learning efforts in.
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. 
...the overall impression one gets is that the usage trend of OE is going downwards... Phix, of course, is on an upwards trend and its future looks brighter than OE's.
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.)
[Phix] is also being much more actively developed (and more thoroughly documented too, in terms of code examples - Pete's wealth of code examples at Rosetta Code, more than 1200 tasks completed, virtually all of the required tasks, is impressive!).
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!
