scripting language vs. developer community size

[Robert Graham Merkel]

Ariel Rios writes:
 > 
 > 
 > On Sun, 14 Jan 2001, Dan Kegel wrote:
 > 
 > > I'm sure this has been discussed a zillion times but I'd like to bring it up again:
 > > 
 > > Requiring that all high-level Gnucash code be in Scheme might be 
 > > restricting the number of developers able to contribute to it.
 > Why? 
 > > Here's a few quotes from the web in support of that theory 
 > > (found by searching for "scheme learning curve"):
 > I don't see why quoting some web posts can be a good reason.

OK, here's the canonical reply to "why do we use scheme".

The "core" developers (dave_p, rlb, grib etc.) all either love, or are
at least comfortable with scheme.  It works very nicely for our
purposes.  We've written a whole lot of code in it, and it's not going
to go away.  I personally dislike Perl, and while I'm not the arbiter
of such things, I would be extremely wary of any new Perl code going into
the main gnucash tree.  In fact, it's pretty unlikely that code in
languages other than C and Scheme will be added to the main tree in
the forseeable future.

As far as providing a perl interface for user scripts, maintaining one
scripting language binding is hard enough.  Maintaining a bunch of
them is too difficult (and if anyone mentions SWIG's guile support
we'll scream) and we have other priorities.

There are two main alternatives, I suppose, if you want perl support.
One is to work on getting/keeping the SWIG perl bindings up to
date - there have been others who have shown interest in doing so, a
quick check of the archives should reveal their email address.  
The second is to get g-wrap to support perl.  Of course, g-wrap
is written in scheme, and people who know scheme aren't really all
that fussed about writing their scripts in scheme :-)

Look, we realize that a lot of people are put off by scheme, but it
really is a nice language once you get over the parentheses hurdle
(and a good editor works wonders for that).

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Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk@mira.net

"We are excited and optimistic about its usage going 
forward and, yes, we can teach penguins the military 
close-order drill", Mark Norton, US Department of Defense. 
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