Re: Eu 2.5 improvements over Eu 2.4
On 20 Nov 2004, at 19:08, Robert Craig wrote:
>
>
> posted by: Robert Craig <rds at RapidEuphoria.com>
>
> spent memory wrote:
> > Can someone list the major improvements of 2.5 over 2.4,
>
> http://www.rapideuphoria.com/relnotes.htm
>
> > after reading
> > many posts and looking through info i haven't found much reason to
> > install the 2.5 that's been sitting on my desktop for 2 days.
>
> Once people start using $ and crash_routine(), and posting
> that code to the Archive, you'll have to install 2.5. 
Copy/replace. Wow.
> > Nor have i seen any posts praising the release of 2.5.
> > Why does it all seem to be negative??
>
> People tend to notice the changes that they don't like
> before they appreciate the changes that they do like.
> Any change at all, no matter how trivial, is likely to
> offend someone. For instance removing a warning message
> that was pretty rare and almost always a just a nuisance,
> has already disturbed a few people, but I'm sure it will
> be a minor improvement for 90% of users who would otherwise
> scratch their heads over how to stop it without stopping
> other warnings at the same time.
Compartmentalise the warnings? Just off the top of my little head:
abort(x)
trace(x)
warning(x)
goto(s)
> Some people complained about speed, then discovered it
> was their mistake, or something weird in their setup.
Or using lots of code to do lots of things.
> Someone complained trace wasn't working, then realized it was
> his mistake.
>
> Startup time is an issue for people running large programs
> on old machines, but that will get steadily better as
> the front end is speeded up, and these old machines are
> gradually retired. Machine speed increases much faster
> over the years than average program size.
Gradually retired? You must have money some of us don't have. My neighbor
has cost me the price of 4 new computers. Real life bites, but must you
make it worse?
> The install program had a couple of people in hysterics
> because it changed one of their Euphoria file associations.
> They didn't realize you could just right click and set it
> back in a few seconds.
It's a minor thing, a bad taste in the mouth of each and every user, thinking
this shouldn't be. What if they all wrote in and said something,, you have ,,
umm,, 5000 users of Eu? Got emailbox space? Or what if they did like i did to
Network Solutions the 2nd time they had a trivial database
corruption, and showed up in their lobby?
> Some wisdom I've gained after doing this for many years
> is this:
> You can never satisfy the demand for new features by
> providing new features. You just make it worse!
> When you give people something new, the first thing
> they do is start asking for enhancements of what you've
> given them.
In the early 1980's, i was complaining, to no one in particular, about the lack
of some features in the Vic20 and C64. Since the C64 had more ready
options in hardware, i spent a couple months and doubled it's OS, poking in
machine code. Eating it's ram for that wasn't so bad, considering how i
paged the new OS code out of program space when the programs fired up.
When i was done, it's software was where i'd like Eu to be now, 20 years
later. I haven't had a pressing need to change anything since, altho i might
want to add a harddrive, since they aren't $200 per megabyte anymore.
> By giving people an open source Euphoria, they immediately
> starting demanding more openness, and more ways to use the
> open source, and they get upset when they can't have it
> right away.
>
> The people on this list who tend to be the most negative,
> also tend to be people who have been on this list for many
> years, and apparently have not found anything better
> to use than Euphoria in all that time.
That says something about how much potential we believe Eu has to
displace other programming languages, and how well we can think outside
those mass-marketted boxes. The people who have left apparently came to
the conclusion that you stopped thinking outside the box you sealed when
you first started Euphoria. I cannot imagine what's wrong with taking down all
those other languages by adding goto to Eu, making it a Lisp-y language
with one of the first reserved words ever in a high level language!
> Having said that, I must admit that it's negative
> comments that are more likely to push me into improving
> Euphoria. Too many positive comments and I might just
> crack open a beer and go watch a DVD for a couple of
> hours instead of trying to improve things.
And i'll drive up there and personally buy you a beer for this wish list:
1) add goto -- like other languages
2) include .il files -- <sigh> scrambled or not!
3) string execution -- like Bach
3a) pre"compiled" .il code for the strings possible?
4) access to the var table -- like mirc, or better!
5) things i forgot to mention here, because of real life stresses..
Kat
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