There was an interesting discussion that took place on the
gnome-hackers list with the same subject as this mail. The
original discussion centered around how to lower the barrier
to entry for new developers. Much of the discussion focused
on language bindings as a tool to lower this barrier. I would
like to start a discussion on this list on this topic. A couple
of questions we should address are:
1) Is it time for the bindings projects to work more closely to
achieve some form of standardization/commonality?
2) What can we do to make GNOME programming more accessible to
the typical developer that is unfamiliar with GTK/GNOME libs?
I have inserted some of the original posting below in order to
set the tone for this discussion. If you want to read the
original posting in its entirety you can go to:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2001-September/msg00167.html
-Jeffrey Morgan
> By attending the university you often hear non-gnome and non-kde
> developers discuss different platforms, technologies, kde and gnome.
> While listening to this I have a bigger understanding why these people
> don't join our project.
>
> One of the reasons is that many people actually don't like C very much,
> and when these people want to code Gnome they go look for bindings.
> Many Gnome developers think that Gnome is very cool with all it's
> binding,
> but this thought is not shared with the whole world outside out
> community.
>
> Many people think that the Gnome development platform is difficult to
> understand. There are lots of libraries, and they are not organized in a
> nice class library. This is possible to do with bindings to OO
> languages, but is as far as I know, not done.
>
> For instance, Java-GNOME has the following "namespaces"/"packages":
>
> gnu.gdk, gnu.gtk, gnu.glade, gnu.gnome
>
> This is very close to the C libs, so it would be easy to switch to Java
> from programming Gnome in C. But almost noone does this. People who want
> to use the Java bindings is often people who don't like C.
...
> If we want people to use these bindings we have to make them easy and
> hide implimentation/bindings details.