Mail Archives: geda-user/2015/02/07/10:19:14
On Feb 7, 2015, at 7:06 AM, John Griessen <john AT ecosensory DOT com> wrote:
> Ease of adding improvements is top importance for volunteer projects.
Yes! It’s not just that gEDA is a volunteer project. The jewel of gEDA is all those gnetlist back ends. Scheme is accessible enough to allow some great contributions here, even though much of the contributed code is not very clean. Many of these were (successfully!) “cargo-culted” from other crude examples by engineers with minimal Scheme knowledge. It helps that the gnetlist API trivially presents the coder with the data needed to construct a flat netlist or BOM, so the job is largely a matter of organization and output formatting. Unfortunately, the deeper layers of information are inaccessible, so, for example, hierarchical netlisting requires external scripting. That’s not so nice either, because configuration info (at least in released versions) is only easy to get at in Scheme. Scheme has not been as successful at extending gschem.
People who understand the EDA domain are not necessarily familiar with the latest programming power tools. So, it is most desirable that the language chosen be easy to learn: a teaching language. Basic and Pascal are too crude, I think. Scheme is not mainstream except for MIT EECS gnurds.
Logo is perhaps more familiar, and more capable than people give it credit for. I was an advisor to a student project that successfully coded its spacecraft control software in Logo (http://universe.sonoma.edu/T-LogoQube/?q=public). If you want to layer something more user-friendly atop Scheme, Logo is the thing to choose.
But I think that Python is hands-down the most successful teaching language ever. In addition, it’s tremendously successful application language, with modules for just about every application domain (http://xkcd.com/353/). I think it’s important that your extension language be capable of connecting to other domains. All those modules make that easy.
John Doty Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
jpd AT noqsi DOT com
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