Re: Euphoria needs more popularity!
--0-827612077-1095277103=:99259
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Dear Euphorians
I agree with Kat that a balanced view of things would best serve the
Euphoria community (although I have no idea whether the list of people
in her email represents a balanced view or not - they are all people
whose contributions to the EUforum I have enjoyed immensely since I
joined the Euphoria community).
I have found Euphoria to be a wonderful language to work with but I do
feel that there is a downside to using it. I constantly oscillate back
and forth between Python and Euphoria and was initially drawn to
Euphoria by the promise of being able to speed up an application that
ran like molasses when coded in Python.
Now I don't want to compare apples and oranges and I certainly don't
want to start a flame war about Python Vs. Euphoria - I use and love
BOTH languages but for different reasons. Python shortcomings are
mostly about its performance as an interpreted language, but things
are improving all the time and there is now a significant body of
know-how and a whole bunch of software tools to address this
performance issue (Psyco, Pyrex, weave, Numeric Python etc. etc.).
Euphoria still wins hands-down in this respect however and for that
(amongst its many other charms - we love it!)
To compare the Python community to the Euphoria community is in some
sense grossly unfair given the difference in scale between the two,
but every time I go back to use Python, I am astounded at the sheer
array of pre-built libraries and Python tools that are available - not
only their number, but the quality and maturity of them. The GUI
interfaces are incredibly well thought out, robust and very mature.
wxPython or PyGTK offer practically unlimited scope for building
graphical applications that look and feel utterly professional. They
have also contributed to the superb roster of Python development tools
such as code-aware editors and IDEs. As a further example, if you find
yourself writing a lot of mathematical code (as I do), there is hardly
any corner of modern mathematics for which there isn't already a
comprehensive Python library or toolkit. The modularity of Python with
its packages, modules and namespaces (and the wonderful 'distutils')
makes all this stuff work together
very easily indeed - and without having to reinvent the wheel each
time, one can quickly create superb and robust Python applications.
The ability to build the Python interpreter directly into the app as a
scripting language should not be overlooked either.
I really feel that if Euphoria is going to grow significantly as a
programming language, it could do a lot worse than emulate some of the
successes of the Python community. The issue of modules and namespaces
has been batted around for some time in the EUforum and would seem to
be a step in the right direction. The OOPS thing is probably a
non-issue since it already exists as an option for Euphoria developers
(if they want it) and the purists always drone on about Python not
being 'pure' OOPS anyway. But the kind of 'modular
re-usable-lego-building-blocks' paradigm that pervades Python
definitely makes it easier to share code in a big community.
As the person who started this thread so rightly observed, Euphoria
needs to be more popular and widespread in order for there to be the
demand to create (and share) all these fabulous tools. In a sense, it
really is very unfair of me to compare the resources of the Python
community to those of the much (much) smaller Euphoria community - but
just because that's how it is now doesn't have to mean that we
couldn't aspire to something similar for Euphoria. I guess the big
question is: 'What would it take for Euphoria to become as popular as
Python?" Should an Open Source version of Euphoria be considered? -
something that could be developed by a community of users with changes
being included in the "official" releases based upon the decisons of a
sub-community of steering users (RDS could continue to sell tools like
the shrouder and the C translator). BTW: I have no right to tell RDS
what they should do with their property nor am I saying that this is
what should be done (it may be
dreadful idea!) - I am just trying to stimulate a discussion about
how Euphoria and its user community might develop in the future.
These are just my humble opinions - please don't flame me becuase you
think I'm being hard on Euphoria, I'm really not - I think Euphoria is
fantastic and the small community of Euphoria users never ceases to
impress me with with its creativity, energy and sheer resourcefulness.
I just happen to think that we can learn a lot from the success of Python.
Best
Gordon
Kat <gertie at visionsix.com> wrote:
On 14 Sep 2004, at 17:55, William Heimbigner wrote:
>
>
> And here is an easy way to bring it:
> On download.com, there have been a total of 10 votes.
> 7 of them were thumbs up.
> 9 of them wrote reviews.
> A good programming language should have plenty of talk about it.
> I would encourage EVERYONE on this mailing list to submit a thumbs up/down
> on Euphoria, PREFERABLY write a good review. That would be awesome.
> People I would especially encourage to write reviews:
>
> Irv mullins
> Al Getz
> Tommy Carlier
> Unkmar
> Derek Parnell
> Pete Lomax
> Matt Lewis
That's probably going to result in a one-sided point of view. What
about David
Cuny, Jiri, Orkim, Robsz, and the rest of us?
Kat
|
Not Categorized, Please Help
|
|
