OpenEuphoria

Re: What's wrong with Euphoria??? Newbie perspective...

• Posted by David <dcuny at lanset.com> Jan 23, 2005
• 509 views

D. Newhall wrote:

> The reason I want Euphoria to be open-source is so we I can use it in more
> places. I don't want to have to shell out $70 just so I can use it on our
> OpneBSD servers at work. 

So your basic argument is that you want it for free?

> Also, I would absolutely love to have an Apache 
> module for Euphoria the way that Apache has modules for Perl, Python, and
> PHP. 

Why would using Euphoria for be better than any of the options you listed? 
What benefit does Euphoria offer for web page development?

> I don't have the time to work on an interpreter from scratch nor do I 
> want to spend $70 bucks for source code I might not understand that well or
> have the time to modify it.

So again, you want it free.

> I disagree with that argument. PHP is the most popular server-side
> scripting language in use today. It began as a modified version of the Perl
> source.

And? There are many, many excellent programming languages that never catch on. 
Many are Open Source.

> In fact, my attempts at writing a Euphoria interpreter used the 
> Perl source code extensively. That's the beauty of open source, you don't
> need to reinvent the wheel each time. 

Again, I don't follow you here. There are at least three versions of an "Open 
Source" version of Euphoria that have been written so far. But it sounds like 
you chose to "reinvent the wheel" again.

> Also, say that OpenEuphoria wouldn't be compatable? 

Yes, that's pretty much the point of it. Unless your motivation is you just 
don't want to pay for Euphoria.

> If it was open-source then someone could just modify it to 
> make it compatable.

But since RDS already has a 100% compatible version, why would someone want to 
waste their time doing that?

> Another argument for open-sourcing Euphoria is that it'll cause the
> language to be optimized better since more people could look at the code
> and analyze it. Also, since you could see the code you could see what the
> more efficient operations are we could optimize better (ex. length(str)=0
> vs. equal(str,"")).

The "mongolian hoards" argument, as if there were zillions of Open Source 
coders just waiting to get their hands on it.

Robert's already done a bang-up job optimizing Euphoria (it was his thesis 
project, after all). That's one of the reasons that Euphoria is compelling in 
the first place.

I suspect that an Open Source version would end up going much slower, as new 
features are added by less skilled coders.

-- David Cuny