On 4/26/07, skaller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Given an intended market of C++ programmers, is Felix
being taught in the wrong order?
For that audience (and I'll hold myself up as an example),
probably. The actual presentation is more suited to people
coming from something like Ocaml, IMO. (Granted, it's a
little inconsistent in which level of understanding it assume,
but that's hard to get right without a lot of work.) It seems
to be written in a rather academic style -- but when I can
afford/justify academic-leaning languages, I use them, there
are plenty around. They just fail when it comes to working
well in the real-world settings where much of the work lies
in interfacing with pre-existing components (including, but
certainly not limited to, operating systems) that expose only
C or C++ interfaces.
The current approach is: it's an standalone language with
it's own types and semantics, and the C++ binding details are
are introduced afterwards to show how to roll your own
semantics.
I've found an issue being that each time you (John) come to
illustrate how to use Felix to do something real, it involves
seemingly magical bindings to C or C++. If those are explained
in the tutorial, I've missed them -- but they seem to be the most
fundamental thing if Felix is aiming for interoperability with C++.
I'd like a "preview" chapter which showed and explained some
simple examples of using Felix with C++, even knowing that it
would have to be light on details on the Felix side (but could
assume as much C++ knowledge as it wished). Sort of a
"how you can use Felix to make your life as a C++ user better".
Would it be better to reverse this top down approach
for the C++ market and show how to use Felix "as C++"
and gradually introduce more abstraction?
For example:
header, body statements
type primitives
fun, proc primitives
cfun, cproc (yay! Actual Felix!)
export
..
etc
All potentially interesting, but what it needs, IMO, is detailed
examples that motivate why a C++ user would want to read on,
and explanations of why Felix has chosen the approaches it
has.
Furthermore, if Felix is improved in this area so that
it can be used simply to link existing C++ projects ..
we have the start of the seamless transition needed to
get a foothold in the market.
Just using flx script, leveraging flx_pkgconfig for
dependencies is already a fairly major improvement for
many C++ programmers.
I've not worked on any projects that have had much of a
problem managing their dependencies, but I see plenty
of evidence of it being done badly (though not for lack of
tool support).
-- James
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