OpenEuphoria

Re: More projects?

• Posted by D. Newhall <derek_newhall at yahoo.com> Dec 28, 2005
• 469 views

C Bouzy wrote:
> 
(snip)
> 
> The Win32API will still be in use 7 years from now, it is not going
> anywhere. Personally I do not see any major advantages of supporting
> other OSes, especially when they only represent 5-7% of ALL computers
> in the world. This means if there were only 1000 computer users in the
> world, approximately 50 would have one of the OSes you mentioned. And
> out of that 50, how many would be using EU?. So Robert is putting in all 
> his time and effort to support other platforms for a handful of users.
> I remember when everyone said Linux would replace Windows, 7 years later
> and Windows is still the dominate OS. Linux is open source and even the
> commercial versions are dramatically cheaper than Windows, and Linux
> still does not have half of the marketshare. 

Cross-platform support is necessary for Euphoria and Rob should work towards
supporting more platforms. As Vincent has said if we were to just have the
Windows version there wouldn't be any incentive to use Euphoria over, say,
VB.NET. I see no indication that Euphoria would magically get a bigger user-base
if the product was Windows-only and given extensive support for that platofrm
only. I use Euphoria at my work and I have used every version of Euphoria and am
eternally grateful that I can move my code between most of the platforms we use
in the lab. I've used Euphoria in DOS to analyze data on one of our instruments,
I've written install scripts for cross-platform software that needs to be
deployed on Linux and Windows using Euphoria, and I've written server scripts for
our FreeBSD server. However, my ability to use Euphoria is threatened because the
platforms many people are moving to at my job (OpenBSD, Zeta, and Mac OS X) are
not supported by Euphoria.

The language Ruby (www.ruby-lang.org) came out after Euphoria did and has gained
a significant market share. Why? The creator "Matz" has repeatedly said in
interviews it was due to the langauge being open-source and people porting it to
other platforms. Now before you say "Euphoria is open-source", yes, that is true,
but that doesn't help us that need Euphoria on an unsupported platform and wish
to port it. To get Euphoria on a Mac I need to pay $80 to get the source code and
port it. I don't have the time and money to do that, that's what RDS's job is.
Some of the most popular programming languages right now all started on *nix.
PHP, Python, Perl, TCL, C, Ruby, etc. were all *nix-only languages to begin with
and all of them are open-source for portability. Even some that aren't
open-source but portable are popular as well, such as Java. Portability is the
key to language survivability in this day and age.


The Euphoria Standard Library project :
    http://esl.sourceforge.net/
The Euphoria Standard Library mailing list :
    https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/esl-discussion