RE: The fate of Euphoria
- Posted by Andy Serpa <ac at onehorseshy.com> Nov 05, 2004
- 498 views
Chris Bensler wrote: > I would gladly pay $100's for Euphoria if I felt that Euphoria was an > acceptable solution to even general programming problems. > Currently, it is not. It struggles to be anything better than a hobbiest > language, or a learning tool. Only with considerable effort is it > possible to create anything significant with Euphoria. I guess it depends on what you consider "significant". The thing I like about Euphoria most is that I can do "significant" things *without* considerable effort -- I spend my time thinking about algorithms in general rather than coding quirks or language specifics. Like I said, I am now making my living using absolutely tools that I developed in Euphoria -- absolutely cutting-edge state-of-the-art AI data analysis programs. And they are in 100% Euphoria, and rather trivial to code (although they would have been much tougher without the existence of Mike Nelson's Diamond). That is quite significant to me. I am also now running several websites that are 100% powered by Euphoria (not the server itself, but Eu generates all the pages dynamically). I administer a database of over 2.5 Gigabytes with a Euphora front-end and query engine (db engine is Berkely DB). I have not run into a problem yet that I couldn't solve with Euphoria (sometimes with the help of a third-party .dll). Often, when I tackle a new problem -- something I've never even thought about before -- I'm amazed that I can have a workable "rough draft" solution within an hour or two and not very many lines of code. I've looked at lots of other languages and haven't found one yet where everything is so easy and yet I can produce programs of such power & flexibility. As we've said, it has issues like anything, but the bottom line is that I would be using something else if I couldn't do what I wanted with Euphoria. Apparently, you haven't found anything else that will do what you want either or else you wouldn't be here trying to push reforms. And there is an Eu open-source movement and v2.5 with its Eu front-end sounds highly "hackable" which is why I will be registering the source code this time around. The easiest solution is to simply implement your own improvements, and you don't have to worry too much about what Rob is going to do. If Rob dropped dead today and Euphoria was "locked" forever I expect I would still find it quite useful for the next several years at least...