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Message-ID: <54D3CF33.3000104@neurotica.com>
Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2015 15:14:43 -0500
From: Dave McGuire <mcguire AT neurotica DOT com>
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To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: [geda-user] FOSDEM
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On 02/05/2015 02:42 PM, mskala AT ansuz DOT sooke DOT bc DOT ca wrote:
>>   It's pretty clear that you simply don't like Scheme.  That's fine,
>> just keep it out of this thread.
> 
> Please keep personal characterization out of both the thread and the list.
> I'm talking about the technology, and I think "that's for toys!" is
> a poor basis for the project to make decisions on scripting languages.

  Don't start.  I can be a far bigger jerk than you, and get there a
lot faster, even on my worst day.

  My point behind the "that's for toys!" argument, which I thought I had
made clearly but I was probably just typing pre-coffee, was that Lua has
an image problem.  It is a good language, and would make a reasonable
extension/scripting language for gEDA, if we were even really thinking
of moving away from Scheme.  My concern is that Lua's image problem
would become gEDA's image problem.  Some of us, actually many of us, are
using gEDA for more than play-toy personal projects.  Often, customers
ask "So, are you using Cadence or Altium?"  This puts us in an awkward
position, in which we are called upon to justify our choices for what
tools we use.

  Now, nobody in their right mind would say something like that to the
guy being paid to work on their car's transmission or the guy fixing
their plumbing, but it happens in our world all the time, and we have to
deal with it or go hungry.  Adding "that gaming language" to the system
would only make that situation worse.  Many people outside of hard-core
theoretical computing types have never heard of Scheme, so that gives us
the opportunity to explain what it is, should the conversation go that
far.  "It's a simple, elegant language out of MIT with roots in the AI
research world" goes a lot farther towards credibility than "It's the
scripting language for World of Warcraft".

                -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ/3
New Kensington, PA