Re: Is Phix the new de facto standard for Eu programmers?
- Posted by ghaberek (admin) Jan 23, 2021
- 2845 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.
My best search shows May 1997, so that's close to 24 years. https://openeuphoria.org/forum/m/34528.wc. The earliest mailing list messages seem to be from around 1995-96.
...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?
MVC has been my focus because that's what scratches the biggest itch for me, as I have personal projects that can and will benefit from that.
...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.)
I can confirm that forum activity has been declining steadily since 2015. I'll try to put together some numbers and charts.
[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.
While I don't want to believe this, I'll admit you may be correct. While I have a lot of ideas for how to move things forward and inject Euphoria back into the mainstream, I simply do not have the time to put in any significant effort toward that, and I find myself stymied by seemingly-trivial problems that I need to fix, but never do, and so the bigger things never even get started.
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!
The only "RAD" tools I see in any mainstream langauges is command line utilities for bootstrapping and managing application packages. Things like composer or cargo or pip. They can help you manage dependencies, create new projects, run database migrations, etc. If what you want is a desktop GUI builder then friend, I think Visual Studio's WinForms designer is the last of a dying breed (hey, that sounds familiar). Modern applications are web-based and "serverless" and all that crap. (But I mean "crap" in a nice way.) Even modern desktop applications are still web-based, using Electron and whatnot.
-Greg
