On Wed, 2003-08-27 at 20:58, Mark Roach wrote: > 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
The same thing is happening now with gnucash, which is partly written in Guile. Guile is a Scheme implementation designed for real world programming, providing a rich Unix interface, a module system, an interpreter, and many extension languages. Guile can be used as a standard #! style interpreter, via #!/usr/bin/guile, or as an extension language for other applications via libguile. > 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. Decades ago, DEC published the DSRI (Digital Standard Run-time Interface) for VMS. Thus, object files generated by the compiler of any language that follows the DSRI spec (all of DEC/Compaq/HP's compilers, of course, including C/C++, COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, Ada, DIBOL, Bliss, MACRO, Pascal, etc, and compliant 3rd-party compilers) can, and do, all link together into 1 executable. As with most other of it's ideas, others are *finally* catching up with DEC: GNU is, I believe, trying to do something similar with the gnu compiler collection. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Ron Johnson, Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jefferson, LA USA Thanks to the good people in Microsoft, a great deal of the data that flows is dependent on one company. That is not a healthy ecosystem. The issue is that creativity gets filtered through the business plan of one company. Mitchell Baker, "Chief Lizard Wrangler" at Mozilla -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
