Re: GSoC proposal: gtk+ bindings for prolog

[Yevgen Muntyan <muntyan tamu edu>]

Hi Ben,

I am not CC'ing gtk-devel-list because 1) it's off-topic,
2) it won't do any good. gtk-devel-list is a list for
discussing development of Gtk itself, not anything
related to Gtk.

I doubt your idea is good for Gnome SoC because
of the following (I am a former SoC participant, so
I've been around this a little).
Gnome SoC ideas must be shiny. They need not be
useful but they must look and sound great, otherwise
you need a "sponsor" who is really interested in
the work to be done, in which case the idea need
not be shiny but it must be good and useful.
Prolog bindings don't seem to fall in either category,
IMO (namely, you won't find a sponsor, I am not
saying it's bad or useless).

But, that's my opinion, which doesn't matter. You
should contact the SoC people about it - they have
an IRC channel and a mailing list. Who knows,
my SoC work wasn't exactly shiny too :)

Best regards,
Yevgen

Ben Torfs wrote:
> Hello, developers!
>
> As a fan of both the prolog programming language and the GTK+ toolkit
> (as a user), I was wondering why the GTK page makes no mention of any
> prolog bindings. For those of you that are unfamiliar: prolog is a
> declarative language (like haskell, but very different in the way it
> works). Until now, it has mostly been used as a research tool in
> artificial intelligence (theorem proving, knowledge representation,
> etc.) However, I believe it has a lot of potential to be used for
> desktop applications too. Haskell too, for example, has also proven to
> be a success for end-user applications (gtk+ bindings exist). I think
> prolog is just a breeze to program in, and I would love to push it
> further! Specifically, by implementing GTK+ bindings for this language
> myself, as a Google Summer of Code project. Implementing all functions
> would probably be too much work for a 3-month project, but it could
> certainly deliver a basic subset, as a basis for myself and other
> developers to continue working on later.
>
> About myself: I'm a computer science student at the catholic university
> of leuven (Belgium). I should hopefully finish my studies in july 2009,
> and I'd love to have some practical experience before then. My study
> program heavily specialises in artificial intelligence techniques, so I
> come into contact with the prolog language quite a lot. I have loved the
> language since I learned it, but I think it's a real shame that it never
> got the attention on the desktop that for example haskell has gotten.
> Hence my proposal! I chose GTK+ for this project because that's the
> toolkit I use on my computer every day, and I won't have it any other
> way. Despite this, I'm unfamiliar with the internals of GTK+. This is of
> course a problem that can be easily overcome.
>
> I would love to send in this idea as a GSoC project, but not before
> contacting this mailing-list. Do any other people think this would be a
> good idea, and is anyone maybe willing to mentor this?
>
> Thanks for reading everyone,
>
> Ben Torfs
>
>
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