Re: Module semi-proposal: gnome-shell

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sriram ramkrishna gmail com>]

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Christian Neumair <cneumair gnome org> wrote:

[orignally and accidentally just sent to Owen Taylor in private]

Dear Owen,

2009/11/2 Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>:

>  GJS and SpiderMonkey: Currently gnome-shell is build using the
>    GJS bindings to _javascript_ which work with the Mozilla SpiderMonkey
>    _javascript_ engine. The comparison to seed/_javascript_Core has been
>    discussed quite a bit in the past, I don't want to go into in
>    detail here; basically the advantages for us are:

I have not been following the GNOME shell discussions, but I wonder
why we _javascript_ is needed at all. Now that some of the core modules
exhibit Python, suddently _javascript_ is discussed. I have always
considered programming and script languages as interchangeable
(besides syntactic and refactoring sugar), so we need a good argument
for adding new ones that just make the dependency stack larger and
larger. I'd really strongly opt for "C + Mono + one scripting
language" or "C + Mono" or "C + one scripting language" when we talk
about the core desktop. I see no advantage whatsoever in a Babylonian
approach -- unless you convince me with good arguments.

So I was checking to see how popular _javascript_ is compared to the others.  _javascript_ is much more popular than our other bindings except for C and Java according to this website:
 http://langpop.com/

This seems to me that it might be a good investment in having _javascript_ if it means that we can build momentum from a popular language and have more people from other OSes be able to take advantage of GNOME technologies.   My two cents.

sri

-- 
-- Sriram Ramkrishna (sriram.ramkrishna_@@_  gmail.com (remove _@@_)