OpenEuphoria

Re: Is Euphoria a Hobby language?

• Posted by "Juergen Luethje" <j.lue at gmx.de> Nov 24, 2004
• 668 views

Patrick Barnes wrote:

> On Tue, 23 Nov 2004 21:07:59 -0800, cklester wrote:
>>
>> 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.

Adding new features would *not necessarily* make Euphoria more
difficult for new people to learn. If would depend on the features,
and on the way they are implemented.

> 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.

It depends on what "new features" you mean. Quoting from
'Euphoria\doc\c.doc':
"... your C/C++ package has 57 different routines for memory allocation,
and 67 different routines for manipulating strings and blocks of memory."

Things like that are not desirable at all. On the other hand, things
like the new crash_routine() procedure provide significant benefit for
everyone, and don't confuse anyone.

<snip>

Regards,
   Juergen

-- 
Have you read a good program lately?