Re: What's Holding Euphoria Back
Bown, John <John.Bown at UK.ORIGIN-IT.COM> wrote:
>Intrigued by references to an existing E language I fired up my Search
>Engines and found that there were a lot of programming languagues out
>there which I had never heard of.
>
Many of these are "specialized" languages for unique uses (ex: JCL). A few
have evolved into more general purpose usage despite this (ex: prolog).
Others have become more-or-less obsolete (ex: Dartmouth [the original]
BASIC).
Go to http://cuiwww.unige.ch/langlist to see a lot of these.
(**ROB: They need to update Euphoria there. **)
Also see http://www.byte.com/art/9509/sec7/art19.htm
>I was more surprised by the number of 'established' languages I'd
>forgotten about which are not commonly used; Modula, Coral, Ada etc.
>
ADA is still heavily used by the US gov/mil since it allows high levels of
"compartmentalization" on projects.
>All these are very credible languages with an established heritage but
>they are just not commonly used; C / C++, lately Java, and Visual Basic
>( from UK job ads it would appear ) are still the main languages in
>commercial use.
>
>So if those languages 'don't make the grade' what chance for Euphoria ?
>
[snip]
You might be surprised to know that APL (the "It's all Greek to me"
language) was once the industry leader. Its major competitor was COBOL and
we all know who won that battle. In fact, APL has a lot in common with
Euphoria when I think about it. Dynamic data structures are the heart & sole
of both languages and both started as interpreters only.
Rob, is there a theoretical link here ?
For the APL uninitiated a file of data could be sorted using a program of
about 150 **lines** of COBOL or about 7 **keystrokes** of APL!
In the past APL lost support for two reasons. The first was a practical
matter that APL was **very** memory hungry in a time when memory was very
expensive and VM did not yet exist (hadn't been invented yet). The second
was more political so to speak... MIS executives (most of whom couldn't even
write a BASIC program) looked at programs in COBOL and said "Looks like
English... Lots of details... This is a good language." The same execs
looked at APL and said "Its too simple... It can't be good because I can't
understand any of it." DOH!!
Euphoria has the same battle... It may become popular with programmers but
it is the MIS department heads that must begin to accept it for it to become
an "accepted" language. No small task. But APL is making a comeback and
REXX, another interpreted language is being heavily used in mainframe
environments so there is hope.
The one truly significant hurdle is that it only runs on a DOS/WIN platform.
I would bet that a lot of Macintosh programmers & OS/2 programmers would
like this language if they could try it on their native OS. The Linux port
is also a good step. If programs could be written in Euphoria instead of
PERL it could become very hot.
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