Re: Trying to reach consensus for the proposed modules

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi,

On Sun, 2006-01-15 at 13:59 -0800, aigiskos wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> --- Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:
> 

> > With python or perl or ruby or haskell or scheme we
> > have an entire
> > language with its own entire framework (for perl,
> > think CPAN) with its
> > own community of developers.  VBA is some half-assed
> > common denominator
> > - which is not useful enough.
> > 
> > Please, don't we just copy windows for the sake of
> > copying it.  VBA is
> > definitely *not* the way to go, WRT to "scripting";
> > especially if we
> > compare it with the solutions we do have.
> > 
> > Ciao,
> >  Emmanuele.
> <snip>
> 
> I believe Chipzz was *not* suggesting that we adopt
> VBA as a de-facto scripting language for Gnome. 

I didn't think that either.  I was object to the usage of a single,
blessed, "scripting language", like VBA is in the win32 world.

I much prefer a "export your interface" approach, where everyone can
come up with a language binding for a plug-in and for the application's
interface library, like Nautilus, Epiphany and Gedit did.

> Rather, I think he was suggesting that Gnome offer a
> common plug-in framework or API into which all
> applications can hook.  I.e. He is worried that each
> Gnome application is coming up with its own plug-in
> framework-- thus needlessly duplicating work.

Each application would still need to export its own data structures and
functions, and then "bind" them (or let other people do it) with
whatever language they want to support (with or without introspection). 

The only point in common would be the object holding the language
interpreter, like python's or perl's own interpreter; but that is
commonly used code, and so dependent on each application's own structure
(think on when doing the garbage collection, for instance) that I don't
think it could be abstracted away in a platform library anyway.

Many implementations, finally, look at each other for ideas (and code),
so we have the Gedit plug-ins implemented similarly to the Epiphany
plug-ins.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi - <ebassi gmail com>
Log: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net