Re: Plans for 2.8 - GNOME Managed Language Services?

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <uraeus gnome org>]

On Thu, 2004-03-25 at 22:05 -0700, Ryan McDougall wrote:

> I think its about time we seriously considered promoting other languages
> to first class status, along beside C. We need C for speed in core GTK+
> libraries, but as computers become faster, human time becomes more
> important than computer time, and high level languages vastly improve
> programmer productivity, as well as encourage new developers.

The productivity improvement claim is a truism I am not sure is really
true as a generic rule. It might be true for putting together
small/mid-size frontend application, but I am not sure how true it
really is for many libraries. A good example from librsvg is that Caleb
spent two long evenings recently on a patch which ended up being about
15 lines. The time consuming part was naturally not typing in the lines
of code, but doing the necessary calculations for the code. I think you
will find a lot of similar examples going through the gnome.org code.

I am not saying we shouldn't offer people the use of more high-level
languages, just that I am not sure we should fire up under the 'using C
is slow' truism which such vigor.

Christian