RE: Is Euphoria a Hobby language?
sixs wrote:
>
>
> I hve read many of the emails that seem to be against RDS and the
> status of the language. I have written many years in COBOL, Basic, and
> languages before COBOL, as well as so called 4th Generation Languages.
> Lots of GOTOs. I have written in Delphia and Visual Basic. What I want
> to know is what is a hobby language.?
> I looked at LUA,REBOL, Ruby, and CAml as well as some others. I thought
> Euphoria was the best pick. Was I wrong?
> Jim
>
This is a good topic. I can't resist.
Foremost, it all depends on perspective, and the task.
This is what I think to be a professional language, and why Eu is not.
It's not the language itself that really determines if it is a hobby
language, or if it's capable of doing professional tasks.
As euphoria is now, it's quite capable of producing very professional
software.
First note, that Euphoria is strictly speaking, a commercial product,
not opensource. It is shareware. Opensource is a different realm, and
different rules apply, as everybody can do what they need to, and
contribute. The life of opensource is insured by being public and
popular.
It's the scale of the tasks you can accomplish with it.
Eu remains to be fit for small tasks, and prototyping. Large projects
exceed Euphoria's ability, mostly do to lack of support, in the form of
quality, standardized resources, and some of the more or less slight
limitations of Eu and it's (IMO) design flaws.
There are quite a number of factors that I see contributing to this
situation. Here is a sammary of what I think affects Eu's commercial
ability.
Because eu is not opensource, we cannot directly control the aspects
below.
There are several points here:
1.Staff
RDS, I should say Robert Craig, is not capable of maintaining the 4
points below to allow euphoria to adequately grow into a viable,
professional tool, by himself.
2.Support
This includes standardization of common API's,
a professional distribution (installer, proper dev tools...),
availability of _quality_ online resources, code, docs, etc..
3.Progress
Euphoria is stagnant. It is updated once a year, with next to 0
consultation with its customers, and the changes are generally
very minor.
Euphoria still ships with ed.ex as the provided editor for coding.
4.Management
On the business end of things, I do not beleive that RDS has the
desire for Eu to be as big as it needs to be.
On the project side of things, Rob does everything by himself, and
seems to prefer it that way. One man cannot meet the demand
required for a professionally viable language.
5.Popularity
Without purpose, there is no reason for RDS to meet the demands
of users who will use Eu no matter what is done to it, because
they just like programming (hobbyists).
Without voice, we have no influence.
Without diversity and activity, problems are solved slowly, and
often poorly.
Without meeting points 1 to 4 above, #5 is not possible.
Each point is relevant to each other, and they all rest in RDS's
control.
Chris Bensler
Code is Alchemy
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