Re: What we really need...
- Posted by jbrown105 at speedymail.org Nov 12, 2002
- 482 views
On 0, Chris Bensler <bensler at mail.com> wrote: > > Euphoria targets DOS oriented users. People now want everything GUI > based. They don't want to interact with text any more than they have to. > Eu doesn't meet this demand in much of any form. Ha! Granted, the interpreter itself is DOS oriented - but look at the number of libs for Windows! And think about how popular Win32Lib is on this list! Euphoria is definately moving to Windows-oriented programming - Irv, myself, and a few others are working on helping the Linux/FreeBSD versions play catch-up - but don't hold your breath. > > I think that most people use Euphoria for the _joy_ of programming, not > the productivity. Having said that, one can only expect to gain > popularity within the hobbyist niche. Right here alone, Eu must live up > to a _special_ demand. As soon as Eu falls short of this expectation, it > will rapidly fall out of favor, with even the small community it has. Very true. However, if you'll notice, most of major Eu programming is done via open-source libs, such as Win32Lib, EuTCP4u, EuGTK, etc. As long as Eu stays the way it is, it doesnt RISK losing us. THe moment it changes, it does. > > Typically, linux users want everything for free/open source. As part of > the beauty of the linux community, the philosopy is "free for all". Eu > doesn't quite meet this demand, although it's definitely reasonable. If we follow that logic, Peu should have killed Euphoria by now. Seriously, this is a problem. Euphoria shouldn't expect wide-spread use on the *nix platform unless it is open-source (or has some sort of heavy coporate backing - which is even less likely to happen). > > And most of all, Eu does not interact well with other programming > interfaces. Unless you want to build your own bricks, for almost every > project you do, you will have to interface with external language > modules. This IMO, completely contradicts EU's philosophy of simplicty. > I know that Python, Perl, Java, etc. need custom, hand-wrapped, C modules to interface external calls into the language. The problem isn't with interfacing with external modules, Euphoria makes it a trival (if tedious) exercise with C. (C++ interfacing needs some work, I admit. But some one has done that in Windows, I think, and you rarely see C++ in *nix, who tend to graviate to C above all other languages.) The real issue is that these languages have all the basic stuff pre-wrapped for the end programmer. In Euphoria, unless you use Win32Lib in Windows, you have no way of doing anything involving OS calls without wrapping them yourself. (I'm gonna release a lib soon which has a lot of Linux libc calls and struct defs, but its still pretty small copmared to whats out there.) So, if you want to compete in this factor, start writing libs to wrap up standard interfaces and get Rob to include them as standard includes. > Chris Euphoria is pretty useful as it is - but one review I read of it compared it to things such as awk and sed. Euphoria _was_ faster than those, but the fact that Eu was compared to those tools would seem to make a point. jbrown -- http://fastmail.fm Access all of your messages and folders wherever you are