Re: Revisiting the Gnome Bindings

["Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro" <gjc inescporto pt>]

Seg, 2004-09-27 às 12:57 +0200, Alexander Larsson escreveu:
> 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.

  You can't compare the popularity of a "lisp dialect" to the popularity
of Python.  Get real.

> 
> 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.

  And maintaining Python code is 6.47 times easier than maintaining C
code.

  Regards.

-- 
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
<gjc inescporto pt> <gustavo users sourceforge net>
The universe is always one step beyond logic.