Is there anything *enjoyable* about our development process?

Thomas Bushnell BSG tb at becket.net
Sat Oct 15 13:12:52 EDT 2005


Ganesan Rajagopal <rganesan at users.sourceforge.net> writes:

>>>>>> "Thomas" == Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb at becket.net> writes:
>
>> If you don't want any extensions, I suppose.
>
>> Some people find the whole advantage of gnucash is that it has an
>> extension language.
>
> I agree. However scheme isn't really a good extension language for most
> people. Guile just doesn't appear to be very popular. I personally think
> Emacs Lisp succeeded amazingly when extensible editors were rather
> unknown. These days most people prefer a conventional imperative programming
> language; just compare active extension developers for (say) Eclipse to
> Emacs. I think this is a pity because Emacs pretty much used to my OS, but
> unfortunately that's the reality.

> These days if I had to choose an extension language, I'd probably choose
> python or Lua. However, changing the extension language midship is not a
> good idea for Gnucash. Post G2, perhaps Gnucash core should gradually become
> 100% C with a well defined API for writing extensions in a language of your
> choice (take a look at Gnumeric for example).

That's not an extension language.  An extension language needs to be
interpreted, not dynamically loaded in that way.  python would do.

Python is, however, a crappy language.

The point of guile, need I remind, is to get rid of the idea that
application designers should be picking the language that users must
write their extensions in.  Guile needs front ends for different
languages, that's all.

Thomas


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