Re: Revisiting the Gnome Bindings

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 12:04 +0100, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:
> 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.

What the fuck? Where did I compare these? Get real. 

The argument was that it was good if you could pick any language to
write desktop apps in. Not whether people would pick popular languages
or not.

> > 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.

Sure. And I'd love to use Python in desktop apps (I'd be for allowing
python in the desktop). However, that doesn't mean its 6.47 times easier
to maintain a full desktop where every app is in a different language,
because the author is free to pick whatever language he chooses.

Clearly, jsh was free to pick whatever language he wanted for sawfish.
And he picked a lisp dialect. This caused actual real problems for the
Gnome project. If we were to allow authors to pick whatever language
they want, its is very likely that this will repeat itself. 

Saying that Python is nice and making up random numbers about how much
easier it is to maintain doesn't make the idea any better.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a scarfaced umbrella-wielding stage actor haunted by memories of 'Nam. 
She's a radical hypochondriac research scientist with a song in her heart and 
a spring in her step. They fight crime!