On Wed, 2003-08-27 at 18:46, Gregory Seidman wrote: > On Wed, Aug 27, 2003 at 10:02:44PM +0200, Thomas Krennwallner wrote: [...] > } > } And that all doesn't matter if you're a free software developer... > } You use the tools YOU like, the language YOU think is the right one for > } your project and don't have to give a damn about other opinions why this > } or that language has to be better than the other. > > ...unless you are trying to build up a community of contributors around > your project, in which case you had better use a language that people who > are likely to want to contribute are likely to know. In that case, whatever > has taken the world by storm is probably a good choice, assuming it is even > a reasonable fit to the task.
Good point. Sawfish was essentially maintainerless for quite some time due in large part to a lack of developers familiar with lisp, or maybe it was the particular dialect of lisp (scheme?, rep?). I would imagine that projects written in fortran/tcl/ruby would also have fewer people in the community with the experience to contribute than comparable programs written in C/Perl/Python. Not that it detracts from the value of the languages themselves, just that, for community-driven projects, finding a large(ish) potential community is probably a good idea. At the risk of branching off in a bad direction, I sometimes wonder whether multi-language environments like .net and (someday) parrot will alleviate or aggravate this sort of problem. I can just imagine horrible programming monstrosities written partly in perl, partly in tcl, python, C, and java. Boy, that was a ramble, need more sudafed :-) -Mark -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
