Re: 3.2: gjs/seed

[Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu vizoso collabora co uk>]

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 01:12, Colin Walters <walters verbum org> wrote:
>
> == Dynamic Languages in GNOME ==
>
> One thing that's worth addressing though (again) is the question "do
> we need both Python and JavaScript?".  The uptake of both seed and gjs
> has been relatively low; lower than Python at least for scripting
> GNOME apps.  However, I think at least one the core reason for working
> on JavaScript remains that *we define the platform*.  Python comes
> with a vast API, a lot of it really old and crufty, but even more
> importantly, large parts of it are *wrong* to use in GNOME.

I share the spirit of that argument, but have to say that in my
experience (developing and maintaining a GNOME-based desktop written
in python for a few years) that won't make that big a difference in
the longer run.

Specially if application authors have to resort to C so often as in
gnome-shell, how can we prevent them from using POSIX stuff that
conflicts with glib?

All things considered, I think we shouldn't try to do more than advise
people to stick with glib as much as they can. And of course, make
sure that the glib API is fully accessible to interpreted languages
(right now, it's not).

Then there's what Paolo said, there are lots of high-level code for
python and others that doesn't and won't conflict with any existing
GNOME stuff and that allows people to do awesome stuff. Writing a
replacement in C/GObject enriches our platform but also limits
application authors a lot.

Regards,

Tomeu