Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2006 15:06:29 -0500 From: "Benj. Mako Hill" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Kragen Javier Sitaker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: what affects programming language adoption?
<quote who="Kragen Javier Sitaker" date="Thu, Nov 02, 2006 at 03:37:02AM -0500"> > Many of them were, in fact, written by one person in their spare time. > > So why are they written in such a small number of languages? The GNOME project is now struggling with the fact that it has not made any attempt to declare a canonical high level language for the development of GNOME applications. In addition to software in C, GNOME now contains a significant amount of software in Perl, Python, Ruby, and C#. There is software in C++/GTKmm but I'm not sure if there is any in GNOME. It's probably easy to find but I just don't know. This large number of languages means that GNOME has become very large and difficult to integrate in some ways. More problematically, it means that there are very few people able to fix and improve every application on their desktop and to work on a set of important integration issues between applications. One of goals of Ubuntu that was never realized was to turn Python into an extension language for everything on the desktop. Microsoft has done amazing things with VB which can be used for everything to simple macros to relatively complex applications. The fact that it lowers the bar to modify all of the software on a system is a very cool thing that free software does not have now. I try to learn at least one new programming language each year but I still frequently use more popular languages for programs I write because I want my software to (a) run without installing lots of additional libraries and runtimes, (b) be modified through simple patches by people who will do not like the software enough to learn a new language, (c) be easily integrated into a number of existing programs or tools, (d) build on top of existing libraries written in a particular language or with bindings only to a particular set of languages. I suspect that the answer to your question frequently includes any of all of those options. Regards, Mako -- Benjamin Mako Hill [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mako.cc/ Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results. --RMS
