Kragen Javier Sitaker writes: >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
True, but that would still be the case if it were all written in C because of the sheer size of Gnome. It takes either an extremely high level of hacker skill or more time than most programmers have to come to understand a codebase that size. Now I realize of course that to make an arbitrary change X to the code base requires understanding only a tiny fraction of the lines of code in the code base, but I assert that Gnome is so complex that understanding just that tiny fraction of lines is too high of a cost for most programmers to pay most of the time. Or so it seems to me. But then I'm pretty sure that my skill at hacking is manyfold less than, e.g., Kragen's is (Kragen is at least 10 years younger than I am for one thing and that counts for a lot in this game), so maybe the world looks different to people like him. -- Richard Underwood a.k.a. Richard Uhtenwoldt
