On Tue, Dec 08, 1998 at 03:09:58PM -0600, Alejandro Aguilar Sierra wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Dec 1998, Asger Alstrup Nielsen wrote:
>
> > Another serious candidate is Perl, which is more widespread than Python,
> > but I fear the syntax of the language will scare people from trying to
> > use it.
>
> agreed.
I'm sure Asger was expecting some perl advocacy, so I'll throw in my two
pfennings.
1) Perl is much more widespread than python, and even more so compared to
guile and other languages that the non-computer science folks among us have
never heard of. (I've heard of SWIG, and I agree that it would be *really*
cool, but it sounds like it's not ready yet. Maybe for 1.2?)
2) reLyX requires Perl, so configure is already checking for it.
3) Perl is stable and very likely to stay compatible for a long long time.
(at *least* 6 months, maybe even a year!)
4) Perl is easy.
I really don't understand Asger's syntax comment (or Alejandro's agreement
with it.) My view of what people would be using this for is sort of like the
batch stuff in xmgr. There, you reference set 1 by saying s1, and graph 2 by
saying g2. I don't see why it's harder to say that you reference variable a
with $a and array b with @b.
Yes, Perl allows all sorts of unstrict syntax, but none of it is necessary. To
print a, you say 'print $a' or 'print "$a\n"'. People may say the OO is
foobar, but is that what we want to use the scripting for? I have actually
told a number of people around my office that the basics of Perl are simple to
learn, and many of them seem to agree. (And LyX is catching on here, too!)
>From Asger's other mail:
> The target audience for the scripting language in LyX is NOT programmers: It's
> LyX power users that want to create shortcuts for common operations, and maybe
> a few super power users will implement the favorite missing feature (such as
> mail merge) they need. In order words it's for the most part non-programmers.
> So using a polish-notation syntax language such as a Lisp variant will scare
> people away: They would never accept that they have to write (+ (2 3)) instead
> of 2+3.
I totally agree. xmgr's batch stuff is a good example. OTOH, the last thing we
need to do is create a new scripting language.
> In other words, I fear that if
> we chose a scripting language that does not have some kind of "natural"
> syntax, we would only get the current LyX developers and a handful of other
> people to use it.
Agreed. But you need to define "natural" for me, and explain why Perl doesn't
fit it.
> If we got a really easy-to-use scripting language, I think
> we could have hundreds of people writing LyX scripting code and make it really
> explode. (Maybe I'm mistaken -- we could put up a poll on the LyX
> web-site...)
Agreed. But do you mean a poll "what language do you want?" or "would you do
scripting in LyX?" I think the former wouldn't really show much that we won't
get in discussion on the list, and the latter is impossible to answer until
you're actually faced with a project you need to do that LyX can't do by
itself.
-Amir
