Mail Archives: geda-user/2015/09/05/20:27:53
On Sat, Sep 5, 2015 at 1:39 PM, Vladimir Zhbanov (vzhbanov AT gmail DOT com)
[via geda-user AT delorie DOT com] <geda-user AT delorie DOT com> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 05, 2015 at 05:07:54PM -0400, DJ Delorie wrote:
>>
>> > It's just an opinion. Tastes may vary.
>>
>> Sure, you can always find a few exceptions to any generalization. But
>> KiCAD's community is growing, they're attracting big projects, and
>> people tend to try them first because they're the better-known name.
>> gEDA used to be that, but now we're the has-beens. Our community is
>> shrinking, we're losing devs, etc.
>>
>> Can we change? Sure, if we really want to, and figure out how.
>>
>> Can we retake the #1 spot? I see no technical reason why not, if the
>> people can work together to address all the reasons why we're not #1.
>>
>> But at the moment, unless we drastically change how we do things,
>> KiCAD is #1.
>
> Over and over again...
>
> Does this mean we should replace Guile with Python?
> (Emacs Lisp with Vim scripts?, LaTeX coding with LibreOffice widgets?
> systemv with systemd etc. etc.)
>
>
> Citate from http://twistedmatrix.com/users/glyph/rant/extendit.html:
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> Access from multiple scripting languages is not a good idea.
>
> In an article I posted to advogato, I described my position on this in
> more detail, but the gist is that it is extremely difficult to design an
> interface which makes sense and helps people be productive in one
> language. Doing it several times over is a fantastic challenge with
> little benefit - in fact, the effort may backfire.
>
> Consider that, if you maintain multiple scripting interfaces, your
> application will develop a ragged community of customization fans, who
> will regularly argue about what language to use to extend your software.
Or you'll become vim, the most successful editor by far. It was a
gigantic relief to stop fighting with elisp and use perl (that I know best).
If we had the topo router going in Ruby that would be lovely, and it
wouldn't have to interact with anything else to be useful.
> If you support Perl, Ruby, Python, and Scheme, you will certainly find
> Python and Perl fans who are using your application constantly at each
> others' throats, re-implementing the same 'script' functionality 8 or 9
> times, and generally wasting time that could be better spent enhancing
> their plug-in packages.
If all these discussions show anything at all, it's that people are not going
to agree which features are most important or how exactly they should
work. It's because their needs are too dramatically different. Therefore,
there's much less waste in having scripts with overlap than you think.
In any case, we have no one in a position to mandate any particular
language. Forks are overtaking main-line already. We'd do better to
try to ensure that all the scripts make it into the distribution somehow
in such a way that people can find them.
Britton
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