Re: Revisiting the Gnome Bindings

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 12:27 +0200, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
> 
> > 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.

Why did we have such a hard time finding someone who wanted to work on
sawfish, and its lisp dialect do you think? We sure did not have have an
influx of lisp people who wanted to maintain it.

I'm sure there is lots of people who wants to write things in their
(latest) favourite language. However, we need to do more than write new
code, we need to support and maintain it for a long time. Often longer
than the interest of the original author.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a superhumanly strong chivalrous cyborg looking for a cure to the poison 
coursing through his veins. She's a high-kicking cat-loving socialite living 
on borrowed time. They fight crime!