Re: Documentation - language default

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On 5 April 2018 at 14:36, Michael Hall <mhall119 gmail com> wrote:

On 04/04/2018 05:35 PM, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:

You can have the best documentation in the world — but if you don't have people working on the tooling and the actual integration between the language and the platform, then you don't have anything that other people can use.

Indeed, and the intention behind Sri's email was to get input from the wider GNOME dev community about the state of the tooling so we can build documentation around the language and platform capable of giving the best app developer experience.

You are asking the *wrong* people.

The "wider GNOME dev community" already knows how GNOME works, and it's obviously skewed towards it; it cannot tell you what the pain points are, because they are either used to work around them, or they don't know them to begin with, as they learned GNOME first and another, non-C language later.

If you want to know the pain points of writing a Python application targeting GNOME, you have to go ask the Python community.

If you want to know how node.js developers can write an application targeting the GNOME platform, you have to go ask the node community.

To give a little context, we didn't approach this with a goal of promoting _javascript_. We started by asking which one language would be the easiest for an app developer to use to build a new application for GNOME desktops. This covered both the difficult of the language itself, the developer community around it, the GNOME specific tooling that would be used, and the documentation already available. We decided that, from what we knew, _javascript_ was probably the best option across all of these considerations, but we weren't sure, so Sri brought it up on this list to get wider input.

So, to reiterate, the goal is not to promote _javascript_ on GNOME. The goal is to pick one language to use in promoting application development on GNOME.

This effort is doomed to failure because GNOME is *not* a single language platform — unless that language is C, considering that our core platform is written, documented, and developed for that language. Since we're not talking about rewriting, say, GTK and GNOME Builder in _javascript_, C is going to be the target of the GNOME platform development efforts.

More effort should be spent into understanding how to make GNOME an enticing platform for other communities to target; what kind of tooling do Python, Perl, _javascript_ developers *already* use, and how can we make that work as a first class citizen of GNOME? In order to do that, you have to ask outside of the GNOME community, because otherwise the answers you're going to get are not going to apply outside of the GNOME community itself.

Ciao,

 Emmanuele.

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