Re: What's Holding Euphoria Back
Boehme, Gabriel wrote:
> But the moment I told them the actual name of this "revolutionary
> programming language", the unanimous response was laughter -- either
> outright, or stifled. At first I didn't realize it, but I've come to realize
> just how much the name prevents people from taking the language seriously.
Cultural. To me "Java" is ridiculous. It does not evoke coffee, not even
an overpopulated island, but a dance popular with whores and pimps in
France
one or two generations ago. Euphoria... well, yes. Anyone for Ecstasy?
> So they go to the official
> Euphoria programming page -- and are greeted with *garish* colors, and the
> following welcome message:
> "This page provides the latest info on Euphoria - a nifty new programming
> language for your PC. Euphoria is fast, flexible and fun; simple, safe, and
> sexy!"
> This doesn't exactly encourage anyone to take the language seriously.
Agree. I don't remember how I came across Euphoria... yes I do! In a
hefty book published by ZDNet, with two CD's. I think the PD version of
Euphoria was there. The color scheme of ed.ex is also abominable, and
the
first thing I did, as soon as I'd figured out enough, was to change it.
So, name, site appearance, editor color scheme, is that all? No. The
price is ridiculous. It does not invite respect. When Turbo Pascal 1.0
came out it sold for $49.95. It was, back then, already incredibly
cheap.
I had just bought Leo Zorman's BDS-C for $180 and I though I had a
good deal. And TP came with an excellent manual. Excellent. (They
slipped, and slipped, and slipped... came Delphi, and that put
me right off Borland for good). Back to Euphoria. In constant dollars,
it would have been back then... let me see... around $15 I think.
I know that the price has come down somewhat, but not a great deal.
That it is difficult to compare because they now come complete with
bloated junk. If I were to take into account learning curves and
development times, I'd say that E*ph*r** is grossly underpriced.
"You get what you pay for" as the saying goes. The solution?
Another language, called something respectable, presented on
www.[your_name].com, with a respectable demeanour (a sober,
somber three-piece suit, no gold teeth please), at a respectable
price. That does not preclude Euphoria from continuing along,
cheap and garish and brassy, at aol. Why shouldn't it? The car
industry has been doing the same for decades. A different
badge, different upholstery, an extra stripe, presto! a new
model, that'll be an extra $10,000, thank you very much.
> I suppose programmers coming in from other languages will complain about how
> Euphoria "forces" you to do this. Actually, Euphoria forces you to do a lot
> of things -- initialize your variables, use valid subscripts, pass valid
> parameters and so on -- which *greatly* helps reduce the number of dumb
> errors in a program. If programmers want the "freedom" to deal with
> uninitialized variables, invalid subscripts, invalid parameters and so
> forth, there are already many other programming languages available to meet
> those needs.
I know a programmer who values the "freedom" to fiddle with the indexing
counter:
for i=1 to length(x) do
...
i= ...
...
end for
He has also built himself a whole library of C++ classes to trace what
his
programs do !-)
Jacques Guy
P.S. Not that I'm complaining about the price. Why, even if Rob would
pay
*me* for registering, I *still* wouldn't complain!
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