Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?
- Posted by ghaberek (admin) Jan 23, 2021
- 2561 views
Judging by the content of the forum, it would seem that as of today Phix is much more used than OE nowadays. But is this really the case? If so, could we regard Phix as the de facto 'flagship' version/variant of Euphoria? (I know, Phix is different from Eu, but still...) This is not just an academic question, I believe, because a total newcomer would want to know which of the two languages they had better investing their learning efforts in.
I hope this is not going to hurt anyone's feelings, but the overall impression one gets is that the usage trend of OE is going downwards. I honestly would be happy if someone disproved this. Phix, of course, is on an upwards trend and its future looks brighter than OE's. It 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!).
Could you please share your thoughts about the points I mentioned above?
Feel free to disagree with me, but please nicely.
You're not wrong. Bringing this up does cause me to feel hurt, but it's certainly not because of you or anyone else in particular. It hurts to think about this but this is something I think we need to face and to discuss. Euphoria is one of my most favorite things in the world and it's something I feel is Very Important™ to the world. It's a language I wish more people used and I wish more people knew of and cared about and I truly believe it could be a great asset to developers everywhere. From best I can tell, this is my twentieth year using Euphoria, or at least being active in the community.
As for the direction of OpenEuphoria, official releases, etc. I'm not sure what there is to say. I keep pecking away at things in a vacuum, whenever I have time (which is sporadic at best), and without any particular direction. I've been getting treatment for my ADHD and that's been going well, but my main goal is improving focus at home and work, so hobbies unfortunately take lower priority (although I'm sure that comes as no surprise to anyone). You can tell when I find a block of time to be particularly focused because I'll have dozens of changes and updates on something in a matter of hours.
I'm not sure what Shawn's been up to, but as far as I'm aware we're the only two who have even so much touched the source code recently. We need more people actively contributing or heck, even attempting to contribute. Last time I asked for help it was on editing and proofreading the documentation. And I was met with six different suggestions on how to edit the documentation and not one single person actually took up my request and tried to follow through on actually doing it. So hopefully you'll understand that being met with that kind of response is quite demotivating when you're just trying to keep your head above the water. If anyone is willing to learn how the current build system work, I'll gladly walk them through it. I think that's the first step to working on a new release.
Now regarding Phix: I don't think I have the right words for how I feel about Phix. I don't want to be critical of Pete's work. I like that Pete has added so many new features to the language but I have a very hard time looking at everything about Phix and then feeling... uncomfortable. I think the best way to describe it is that Phix falls into the uncanny valley for me. It closely resembles what I think Euphoria should be but at the same time it feels strange and foreign somehow. I think a lot of that has to do with the way Pete's named things ("p-this" and "p-that") and his heavy use of inline assembly language (it's veryveryvery hard for me to grok) or the black magic of automatic includes. And while Pete's documentation may be thorough in content, the whole Phix website is hard to navigate in general and that makes finding things very difficult. All that said, it's nice to see what Pete is doing and he and Phix are welcome here any time.
-Greg
