Re: Eu 4.2.0 Beta?
- Posted by ghaberek (admin) Jun 16, 2022
- 966 views
Perhaps i am confused. To me a beta is newer version and I have gone through 4.05, 4.06 4.1 and now we are talking of 4.2.
The next release of Euphoria will be version 4.2. We did go through 4.0.1, 4.0.2, etc. up to 4.0.5. And a while ago I retroactively declared 4.1 to be a "full" release. Some new features and changes are version-dependent so the master branch will be getting incremented soon as we move towards an actual release. Keep in mind that some features like structs and a lot of the standard library features are already in various states of half-complete.
What I was trying to convey is that we should look at the languages which are successful in the market place and try and introduce those features.
I couldn't agree more. This is why I'm working on adding features that very common and useful in the world, like parsers for Markdown, JSON, and SGML (HTML/XML). And a template engine. And database support. And zip files and gzip compression. And cryptographic hashes like MD5, SHA2, etc. And support for HTTPS and other encrypted protocols. And SQL database connectors like MySQL/MariaDB, Postgres, and SQLite.
But -- and this is very important -- while sometimes languages are popular because they're good, sometimes they're popular because they are popular. It's a weird paradox but it's still true nonetheless. Sometimes a language like Python or Java takes off not because it's a good language but because it's just good enough to be popular. Then a community swells around the language and it takes off even higher.
We should not bother to see if those features are "Good". As long as you can say we also have that in Euphoria, you are OK.
Well, they should still be functionally good features. Nobody wants to use a bad feature, right? I think that right now, we need to focus on bringing Euphoria up to par with what the rest of the world expects a programming language to have. And we're getting there. One of the biggest features I think we need is classes, but I'll admit that's very much a "next version" feature.
Quite frankly I have not been able to convince my nearest relatives to use Euphoria, because they talk of Python and Java all the time.
Right, like I said: popular because they're popular. Python is good. Java is awful. In my opinion Euphoria is better than either, but right now we can't offer half the functionality those languages have until we can pull Euphoria up to speed and then start moving forward.
All that said, I think we're all on the same team here. If anybody wants to help contribute so we can get things moving along better, just speak up. There's no shortage of things to do and a lot of the work is "front end" stuff (like standard library) or "user facing" stuff (like documentation).
-Greg
