Re: 3.2: gjs/seed

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Sat, 2011-04-30 at 02:28 +1200, John Stowers wrote:
> > String handling and containers are sort of limited lowlevel things
> > though. I don't think anyone has a problem with using the language
> > native versions of these. Especially since the gnome platform story on
> > these are quite weak.
> > 
> > However, a platform like pyton is much richer. It contains many things
> > that directly conflicts with our platform. Config APIs (gsettings), http
> > support (soup), file handling and streams (gio), ssl support
> > (glib-networking), etc. Isn't there even talk about a native python
> > widget toolkit?
> 
> I don't think that is fair. I'm happy that I was able to do all these
> things using the python standard library while waiting for the GNOME
> libraries to catch up. Now that we have gio,gsettings,soup,json etc (and
> g-i support) I will use them instead.
> 
> Almost every language lets you shoot yourself in the foot in a myriad of
> ways but if the argument is that pythons failing - 'you might mistakenly
> choose to use non/incompatible GNOME libraries' is bad, then I think
> that is a weak argument.

Note here, I'm not saying its a failure of python that they have a great
library stack. In fact, that is imho the major feature of python (more
important than say syntax or object model). However, that doesn't 
necessarily mean that python is a great choice to make as the "default"
language for the gnome stack, as that major feature is then sorta in
conflict with the goal of gnome (to make its own platform stack).

This is even more true in the case where you're doing a C core + JS ui
logic kind of app, then you're not really gonna call into *any* library
stack stuff, but just into the app classes (and say gtk/clutter), so
the availibility of more libraries are not really very useful, even if
they were fully compatible with the gnome stack.