RE: open source alternative
>From my understanding of most of the open source efforts, there is a
strong effort to keep development coordinated. It is frowned upon for a
group to take the code and make an independent version unless there is a
major rift among the developers. If Euphoria were made open source I'd
expect Rob could make some money publishing the definitive Euphoria
books at O'Reilly and would be the coordinating/consulting guiding word
on the development effort. I recommend reading "The Cathedral and the
Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond, et al. which gives an interesting picture of
the open source community and why it is able to effectively develop
complex code with many, many contributors. Of course, it is possible
that some folks might extend the code in areas which Rob feels should
not be done, but that's the way it plays out.
I think that is my biggest complaint about perl (which I love to code
in). There have been so many people pushing it in different directions
that it can be very difficult to read code done by someone who uses a
different set of features than the ones you usually use, especially if
the coders leave off the optional things which help to identify program
elements. For instance, function calls in perl use parens to enclose
parameters unless you don't want to. Since they are optional you might
find a function call in someone's code where the elements following the
parameters are parameters, but that isn't obvious since they are not
enclosed in parens. Many other syntax elements have become optional
over the years as people make the interpreter smarter so that it can
infer from usage whether an identifier is a function call, variable,
array, or hash based on other clues, but that means that readers of the
code have to do that same inference instead of being able to use the
syntax clues to identify what the program element is.
I like the relatively clean style of Euphoria code, but I see its lack
of an easy way to interface with other languages with standard data
structures that can be declared as such and used directly as a major
impediment to acceptance of the language for general development.
I'll try to get the source for my sokoban program sent here this week.
It doesn't look as slick as the conversion that David did, but it has
more features such as saving scores, undo, etc.
-J. Kenneth Riviere
Irv Mullins wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Apr 2001, rudy toews wrote:
>
> > hi EveryOne,
> > recently i heard open source was being considered.
> > i believe open source would cause too many versions to be created.
> > i think one version is much better at any one time.
>
> I have to agree here. Given then large number of good suggestions for
> improvements that pass thru here, if source were available no doubt
> there
> would soon be a dozen versions of Euphoria, each implementing some,
> but not all of the improvements. The fragmentation would make it
> difficult
> to write a program that would run on all or most of these versions.
>
> > i don't know how it would be implemented but an idea simmering in my
> > head is a common direction be set by using a flowchart(?). <snip>
>
> Honestly, I think the task of managing a project like that would be more
>
> time-consuming than just writing the code all by one's self - as Rob
> has been doing. One thing we have to congratulate Rob on is the
> lack of real bugs in his code. I, for one, don't think that would be
> true
> if several people were working on it.
>
> Maybe what we need to do is find a way for Rob to devote more time
> to the language. Any ideas?
>
> > Rob, thanks for starting Euphoria. i like it.
> > and thanks for everyones contributions.
>
> Regards,
> Irv
>
>
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