Re: Revisiting the Gnome Bindings

[Reinout van Schouwen <reinout cs vu nl>]

Hello Havoc,

On Sat, 25 Sep 2004, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> 1. imagine running a pygtk applet, a perl applet, a gtkmm applet -
>    just that would make the desktop a fair bit bigger in resident size.

This argument has been used for years against Java. It's not really 
relevant because memory + cpu gets cheaper all the time whereas the 
runtimes are being optimized.

> 2. imagine the desktop is written in 10 languages, especially
>    if some of them are kind of obscure; it'd become relatively hard
>    to build GNOME and become a GNOME hacker, since you'd have to
>    get all these compilers/interpreters and bindings working, and then
>    learn all the languages.

I'd argue the opposite thing. Building GNOME and configuring the build 
environment is something that your distro should be able to do for you, 
if you couldn't handle it yourself. But the dependency on C had always 
held _me_ back from hacking on GNOME. Having modules written in whatever 
language the programmer thought appropriate, I expect will *enlarge* the 
potential contributors base because every kind of programmer, not just 
the C hacker, will find something he'll be able to understand quickly.

> Anyhow, so really to use bindings we need to choose some pretty small
> number of them, for mainstream languages, or it'd get crazy.

Call me crazy, but I'd welcome any cool GNOME app, no matter what 
language it was written in. :)

regards,

--
Reinout van Schouwen			student of Artifical Intelligence
email: reinout cs vu nl			mobile phone: +31-6-44360778