What's your favorite year end method?

[Donald Allen]

On Dec 21, 2007 10:56 AM, Lincoln A. Baxter <lab at lincolnbaxter.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-12-17 at 16:20 -0500, Josh Sled wrote:
> > As for the reports themselves, I don't think I want to leave it up to
> > "any swig-ified language", so much as have the community pick a single
> > preferred language, at least for the distributed set of reports.  The
> > motivation against leaving it open-ended is
> > distribution-packager/maintenance
> > burden of depending now not on guile+slib, but on *all* of
> > {perl,python,ruby,haskell,guile+slib,…} for the menagerie of reports
> > that
> > were contributed.
>
> $0.02: Would you consider supporting several major "swig-ified"
> languages?  Perl support might motivate me to be interested in
> contributing some (non-work time) time.  Perl's Finance-Quote module is
> already integrated (a plus for supporting Perl).  I'm already a CPAN
> author (not very active these days) but I'd be very interested in
> reviewing/contributing to a Perl OO reporting module, and certainly know
> how to do perl module development.  I'm sure I do not have the time to
> do it all.

No insult intended, but Paul Graham once observed that Perl programs
look like a cartoon character swearing. One of the problems with the
current Scheme implementation is that it's, well, Scheme, and
therefore hard to read for people who aren't fluent in Lisp, the
majority. I think Perl, powerful though it may be, is very hard to
read. Tcl, too, and I've written a hell of a lot of Tcl code. This is
the reason for my enthusiasm for Python -- it's easy to write concise,
readable programs. Graham also observed that we spend a lot more time
reading code than writing it. So I fear that writing reports in Perl
smacks a bit of going from the frying pan into the fire.

I have no intention of starting a language flame war here, and I've
been doing this for long enough (43 years professionally) to know this
is a religious issue. I'd just hate to see this project repeat a past
mistake. My $.02.

/Don

>
> Lincoln
>
> _______________________________________________
>
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.