OpenEuphoria

Re: Is Euphoria a Hobby language?

• Posted by Patrick Barnes <mrtrick at gmail.com> Nov 24, 2004
• 652 views

On Tue, 23 Nov 2004 21:07:59 -0800, cklester <guest at rapideuphoria.com> wrote:
> posted by: cklester <cklester at yahoo.com>
> 
> sixs wrote:
> 
> > I looked at LUA,REBOL, Ruby, and CAml as well as some others. I thought
> > Euphoria was the best pick. Was I wrong?
> 
> In my opinion, no. In my experience, no.
> 
> But then, I don't have a CS degree, so what do I know? ;)

Euphoria's biggest flaw is that sometimes you are forced to do things
in a slow way, because there are limited ways to accomplish task N.

It makes life a lot easier for people learning the language,
especially as a person learning to program the first time, because
they don't have to deal with 16 different constructs that seem very
similar at first.

People who have used the language for a long time, and have used other
languages, begin to realise that some of the simplicity in Euphoria
makes it hard to do things. For instance, constructs like continue,
try/catch, switch(), pointers, structs, unions, OO, are completely
absent from Euphoria.

I understand that to add some new features to Euphoria would make it
immensely more powerful, but that it would make Euphoria more
difficult for new people to learn.

It's true that new features break none of the existing
functionality... but it does make it harder for people to learn the
language, even though they can write things exactly the same way,
because rather than choosing A or B to accomplish task N, they have to
choose between A, B, C, D, E, F, G!

For those of us who know the language already, it's not an issue.
Newbies will have a harder time of it though.

Rob's entire pitch is geared towards Newbies. Hell, right next to my
Gmail window I see this:
"Download Euphoria
A powerful programming language even a dummy can learn. By RDS.
www.rapideuphoria.com"

So yes, I'm afraid that Euphoria will remain a hobby language, because
that is RDS's target market right now.

I don't like this particularly, I'd like to see Euphoria suitable for
use in quite advanced applications... but unless there's a *business*
reason for Rob to do so, nothing will change.


What do y'all think of this? Is it a reasonably accurate explanation?
What can we do to change the target market?
-- 
MrTrick