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Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2012 08:33:40 +0100
Message-ID: <CAGde_xNMjE-Z126DYLFdGqwadqPOo=z2j6W7tPD76CAa1JOLxQ@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [geda-user] Thoughts on gschem UI
From: Svenn Are Bjerkem <svenn DOT bjerkem AT googlemail DOT com>
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On 20 November 2012 07:25, Dave McGuire <mcguire AT neurotica DOT com> wrote:
> On 11/19/2012 09:18 PM, Britton Kerin wrote:
>>>   If gEDA moves to Perl as its scripting language, I'm going back to
>>> pencil and paper.
>>
>> Perl                          vs   Lisp
>>
>> one working implementation         ~4 different half finished ones
>> weird syntax                       weird undocumented metaprogramming
>> nice module repository             no repository, just use google :)
>> embeddable                         depends which one you use
>> extensible (call C)                I have no idea
>> one monolithic community           ~4 tiny communities
>> works fine in vi                   emacs MUCH more painful to extend IME
>>
>> Language snobbery aside, lisp really doesn't have much going for it.
>
>   And the PerlTribesmen descend with fire and sword.  So predictable.
>
>   I won't even dignify it.
>
>>>   Lisp is used by the ones with long history, but it CONTINUES to be
>>> used there because it's a very good tool for the job.  Autodesk isn't
>>> dumping Autolisp for Perl or Ruby. ;)
>>
>> Its all just momentum.  Nobody is putting it in anything new today.
>
>   Of course.  And that's obviously also why the Linux kernel hasn't been
> rewritten in Perl. (as has been suggested by other PerlTribesmen)

Language wars have never lead to anything, except Richard Stallman
calling John Ousterhout a 'parasite' in front of Tim O'Reilly at a
conference. I find this a quite amusing history.

Somewhere down the road, the decision was taken to use guile as
scripting and extension language for gEDA, and not Tcl, even if Tcl at
that time was mature. Tcl as an extension language was mature and
stable before gEDA went public. Perl was also mature at that time, but
except for one waveform viewer I once tried out, I have not seen much
perl in the extension league. Maybe the BSD license of Tcl scared the
devs that time, or maybe they were pure GNUists. They still live to
tell, if they care.

I have nothing against guile anymore. At the beginning of gEDA, guile
was often a source of problems when it came to stability and
compilability, but I guess that is not a problem anymore. Lisp is a
nice syntax which helps the programmer indenting his code. Cadence
chose to modify their Lisp dialect to accept INFIX notation to make it
easier for novice programmer to grasp things, and to write a tad bit
less code on the tool command line to get info in and out.

Tcl was written for this kind of job, but nobody likes it because they
think they must write complete programs with Tcl. I have tried to
write applications in Tcl/Tk, and I accept that it is not its primary
goal. It is an extension language with an extension language syntax.

Python was not written for this kind of job, so everybody loves it
because they can write complete programs with it. The object oriented
nature of Python is designed to hide details from the user, even at
the method implementation level. Hiding details from the user is not
the target of EDA automation.

-- 
Svenn