Re: [sawfish] Re: The dark corners of rep

[Eli Barzilay <eli barzilay org>]

On May 13, Christopher Roy Bratusek wrote:
> Am Dienstag, den 12.05.2009, 20:56 -0400 schrieb Eli Barzilay:
> > On May 12, Christopher Roy Bratusek wrote:
> > > Am Dienstag, den 12.05.2009, 13:58 +0900 schrieb Teika Kazura:
> > > > One more bad point is there: not for dev, but that users of
> > > > Sawfish have to learn Rep.
> > > 
> > > ... if we switch they'll have to learn <xyz> instead of rep,
> > > that not a valid point against rep in favour of lisp/scheme.
> > 
> 
> I meant the learning thing in general,

Learning a known language is easier.  Checkout the number of
scheme/lisp books vs the number of rep books...

> and we were talking about users, not developers.

That depends on what you mean by "users" -- if these are the people
that use the WM as an end product without their own scripting, then
they don't have to learn anything.  (They still benefit indirectly
from having more functionality in the WM, but given the dumbing down
of popular WMs I don't think that it makes any noticeable difference.)


> (some) THINGS THAT THE REPLACEMENT FOR REP NEEDS TO HAVE:
> 
> - who rewrites the whole(!) lisp part? (I don't have the time, currently
> fully rewriting a project of mine and don't want to do that again ^_^;)

You forgot to mention that this is the biggest pro point for rep --
the fact that this code is all there.  So yes, this is a problem, and
especially given the mess that I described in the previous message, it
can rely on these obscure features in unexpected ways.  But a good
Scheme should be able to imitate most of rep's abstractions (for
example, if this was done with PLT, I'd write a `rep' compatibility
language with the rep features, then migrates pieces as needed).


> PRO REP:
> 
> - ours and if we need to make changes inside we don't rely on other
>   devs

That's also a point against it: there are a lot of hacking resources
(= people) who might have contributed if the language was saner, and
the productivity of people who did contribute could have been
improved.  (But YMMV.)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                  http://www.barzilay.org/                 Maze is Life!