OpenEuphoria

Fair Criticism

• Posted by Irv Mullins <irvm at ellijay.com> Aug 10, 2001
• 614 views

I rarely see mention of Euphoria in any newsgroups, and when I do,
more often than not it is negative. Below is one. While you
might argue with points one and two, point 3 is right on the money.

-- quote:

  1) I'd never even heard of it before, and I'm a language slut.  This
suggests to me that the user community is very small, and when the
author gets tired of it the language will die.

  2) It's commercial and proprietary (it's cheap, but it still costs),
which IMO are acceptable for applications but extraordinarily bad ideas
for basic infrastructure like a programming language.

  3) It's not object-oriented, and doesn't even have structs.  This is
the real show-stopper.  Without this capability, it's going to be a
nightmare to write code using complex data structures.  The example in
the manual of using sequences as structs is just evil incarnate:
]A Structure:
]        employee = {
]                    {"John","Smith"},
]                    45000,
]                    27,
]                    185.5
]                   }
]To access "fields" or elements within a structure it is good
] programming style to make up a set of constants that name the various
] fields. This will make your program easier to read. For the example
] above you might have:
]        constant NAME = 1
]        constant FIRST_NAME = 1, LAST_NAME = 2
]        constant SALARY = 2
]        constant AGE = 3
]        constant WEIGHT = 4
]You could then access the person's name with employee[NAME], or if you
] wanted the last name you could say employee[NAME][LAST_NAME].

  The mind recoils in horror!
-- end quote

Anyone who has written a substantial program in Euphoria surely will have to
agree that
this arrangement is complex, error-prone, and belies any claim of
"simplicity" that might
be made about the language.

Is this going to be fixed in 2.3?

Regards,
Irv