Re: official support for more scripting languages in gnome needed

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

On Sun, 18 Mar 2001, Ben Ford wrote:

> > Why should you care what language a useful tool is written in?  For many
> > tasks, there is no noticable speed or CPU usage problems when choosing a
> > scripting language.  Often these languages let the programmer write
> > shorter programs that are less likely to have bugs in them.  Why is this a
> > bad thing?
> >
> > Do you refuse to play AisleRiot because the game rules are written in
> > scheme?
> >
> > I am not sure I am in favour of rewriting existing applications in python
> > or perl just for the sake of using a scripting language though.
>
> You are making the argument for Visual Basic.  Do you remember the
> proliferation of *very* bad programs when VB hit?  What is the next step?
> Perl macros in email?

I hate to tell you, but it is possible to write bad programs in almost any
language.  If a program written in python is going to be included in a
GNOME release, then it will have to meet the same quality standards as any
other program.

I have seen some very good quality GNOME programs written in scripting
languages and some very bad quality (third party) GNOME programs written
in C.  Do you have any other problem with these languages other than them
being easy to use?

James.