cornelius puts in the good word for ruby. i, too, prefer ruby and agree with all the technical and social reasons cornelius gives for this (heck, as he noted i wrote them in the blog he replied to ;). and if ruby ends up becoming as popular as python, you bet i'd prefer to see us go that route. but that's the rub: right now python is installed pretty much everywhere, it's used by most major linux distros for building their custom apps and likely still has the edge on ruby when it comes to things like bindings support outside of kde (where we have -awesome- support thanks in large part to rich). for that to change would probably take years and it'd be nice to having something between now and then. (apparently ruby won't even have proper unicode support in the language until version 2, so it's got room to grow too anyways.)
in the end, despite my own crush on ruby, i'm willing to lay down my personal language preference and ask if we can't push ahead with a good-enough solution for the vb crowd.
and no, it won't prevent people from continuing to write in ruby or java or c# or dylan or ....... whatever so i don't think that's a fair statement to make, cornelius =) it's just means we'd have a language we could all agree on to support so that it's the easy answer from an availability standpoint. it's not like it has to be a five star solution .... we're talking ex-vb-ers here, after all ;) and python is generall good enough(tm)
p.s. to ade congrats on getting your thesis done. wooo hooo!
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5 comments:
Can't we all just get along? ;-)
Or in other words, I'd love to see both Python and Ruby become first class language citizens on the OSS desktop. As long I get to use one of the good dynamic languages that I like (python for me) not having to deal with the vagaries of C++ would definitely push more on-the-fencers like me to contribute more often :-)
what we really need is the parrot virtual machine as the back end and then you can have whatever your favourite language is as the coding language - perl, python, ruby, basic, occam, fortran, cobol ...
A penny for your thoughts about ocaml.
Can't we all just get along? ;-)
Well yes, we still can. No one can make Python disappear. However, the free desktop world needs a focused language and environment that will attract VB and ex-VB people and create a lot of apps and open source infrastructure that is sorely lacking.
It's worth pointing out that VB people have been royally shafted by Microsoft, so it's probably a good time to be talking about it. VB.Net is not VB (and it's not a RAD language), and existing VB code is pretty much useless if you want to try and update. VB, although not perfect, was a good language and environment for producing decent desktop applications without a lot of pointless complexity. Microsoft should have created a RAD environment on .Net, but no.
what we really need is the parrot virtual machine as the back end and then you can have whatever your favourite language is as the coding language
No, no, no, no, no no, no and no again. A common virtual machine is not a good thing at all. Interoperability certainly is via various means, but having a common runtime that you port different languages to results in those languages not actually being good for anything or different in any way that makes them relevant. .Net is a spectacularly good example of it, which I commented on earlier.
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