Mail Archives: geda-user/2015/02/06/00:37:58
On Thu, 5 Feb 2015, John Doty wrote:
> Except that I know many more people who are comfortable in Python than are comfortable in any dialect of Lisp (although there?s a Clojure programmer in my kitchen at the moment). And while there is some familiarity with Lisp in the EDA community, a bit of review of the gnetlist back ends would suggest there is not a great deal of Lisp mastery in the gEDA community.
I can second this. While python is not my favorite language, it's at least
closer to the usual procedural language stuff many people got used to. If
I had thousands of lines of code in the netlister for example and had to
change a tiny part, I would find my way much-much faster in python or lua
than in any lisp dialect.
Before you say it's a personal preference and background question, yes it
is.
But before you say it's because I didn't spend time on scheme... I did. To
solve my gnetlist problems, I've written gnetlist plugins to output the
netlist in various text formats so that I can easily process them with
other languages. It took surprisingly long to clone an existing
netlist backend and turn it into a simple "just print all data without
trying to process too much". For me, it was because of scheme (and in
general, the lisp dialect and the functional paradigm).
So face it, there are people efficient with lisp while other people find
this paradigm a show-stopper when it comes to editing sources of a
largeish software. There's an intersection, but majority of potentional
users will tend to be not in there. There won't be a decision that makes
everyone happy.
However, bringing in PR like lua being a toy (... or lisp and dialects
being academic) won't change this.
Regards,
Igor2
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