Re: Mono/GTK#/Tomboy

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

Hello,

> Python was the first language to reach enough maturity and ruffle the
> least amount of feathers, and that is a point of differentiation with
> any language that comes in later.
> 
> The important thing we wanted when Python got accepted was to have at
> least one higher-level language to be available for use, and not have a
> lot of them.
>
> So in short, I don't think there is an equal footing, and if people
> would want Mono in, it should replace Python, not sit side by side to
> it.

This is radically different than your original proposal, when you
brought Python up in September 2004.  This is what you said:

> Why prove Havoc right so quickly ? The discussion on "what language
> should go in" has been hashed out numerous times already, don't give
> Havoc the satisfaction of predicting our behaviour of degenerating the
> discussion into a language discussion.
> 
> I am asking a very concrete, specific thing - here's a module I'm
> maintainer of and which I feel would benefit from being written in
> something more flexible than C, and I want to use python for it.
> 
> What would happen to the modules involved ?

Today the issue of resource usage is brought up as if it were the end of
the world, back in the day, Jonathan made the following comment:

> I would love to see limited use of python in the desktop release for
> GNOME 2.10.  I'm not sure we want to see applets or core components
> written in python yet, primarily because of the assumed resource hit.
> I'd love to be proven that it is feasible, though.  It certainly makes
> sense for applications with a limited lifespan, such as those in the
> control-center or gnome-utilities.

Murray at the time posted the following eloquent email on this subject:

> > What's the compelling reason to ship bindings?
> > Great apps.
> 
> I personally think that "Great development environment" is a more
> compelling reason, given that the majority of software development is
> in-house stuff that will never be on distros. That really is a vast
> huge immense amount of unseen software.

The same applies here.

I do not think there should be only "one way" of building applications
for Gnome.  We would not have the official language bindings release if
we thought that only C code was worth having.

Miguel.