Subject: Re: Scripting
From: Eric W. Sink (eric@sourcegear.com)
Date: Fri Jun 23 2000 - 19:25:53 CDT
Check the archives. One of the very first discussions on abiword-dev
was a flame war I started about scripting languages. It was a pretty
useless discussion, given that scripting was not an imminent feature
at that time.
And, I suppose I'd say it's still not. :-)
I can't say that I'll want to get completely ludditory on this issue.
I've read the Guile stuff, and what they're doing is of some
interest. I'm a language junkie when I'm not in turbo user
advocacy mode. My history contains all kinds of interpreters,
parsers, compilers, and stuff.
Whenever we do get around to the implementation of scripting support,
I doubt we should completely rule out Guile. However, I consider
it to be a very non-user-focused choice. Guile is exactly the
kind of thing that normal people hate. The rhetoric on the
Guile page certainly *sounds* nice, but I don't really think that
users want a choice of scripting languages. Normal users don't
like choices. Developers do.
Guile is also a nightmare for a product whose only possible
revenue model is the sale of technical support. Making money
on technical support is not all that easy anyway, since the
margins are fairly thin. However, the notion of building a
real tech support team for AbiWord is just not going to get
any easier if we expose our users to things like Guile.
Personally, I prefer Python, but I rather doubt that our users
are going to appreciate that much more. It's easy, but it's
just not Visual Basic. If there is ever such a thing as a normal
user of AbiWord who wants it to have scripting, then they want
it to be VB.
I could picture us implementing Guile, simply as a self-serving
effort to please ourselves, the geeks of the project. However,
I don't think we would want our users to know about it. Guile
is the antithesis of K.I.S.S.
In any case, I don't see this issue being all that urgent. It's
a favorite pet subject of mine, but it never seems relevant to
the task of getting AbiWord far enough along to attract millions
of real users.
-->Warning: what I am about to discuss is probably pretty contraversial. I >don't want to start a language war. These are just my opinions! I want to >propose some topics for discussion but NO FLAMES PLEASE! >_________________________________________________________________________ > >All programs that I consider great are extensible. Emacs is one of those. >No, I don't want to make AbiWord as ugly and user-unfriendly as emacs. I >think that AbiWord should be extensible. MS Word has visual basic >scripting, but a real programming language could blow that away. > >Enter guile. Guile is designed to make C (and presumably C++) applications >be extensible via a scripting language. NO, Guile is _NOT_ >scheme-specific. Quoting from the Guile page at >http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/: > > If your application uses Guile, your users have their choice of > scripting languages, as long as there's a translator for the language > of their preference. A translator is a Guile module that translates a > script language --- like Python or Tcl --- into Scheme, which Guile can > then execute. Scheme is a sufficiently powerful and neutral base that > other languages can be translated into it with ease and efficiency. > >XP compatability should not be a large concern. According to the message >at http://206.63.100.13/pub/list/lispos/9707/msg00010.html, Guile already >runs on Win32, and since BeOS and QNX are unixlike if I am not mistaken, >porting it to those platforms should not be difficult. > >Guile would give people choice about how to extend AbiWord. People like me >who wanted to muck with internals could customize it as much as emacs, and >a church secratary could just ignore extensibility features, except >perhaps being able to use scripts that someone has already writen to >simplify work. These would be more like macros, but guile has the ability >to make a program extensible so that scripts can change the way it >operates. > >Sure, it's possible for Abi to have its own scripting language, but then >people would have to learn a whole new scripting language rather than >using the full-featured programming language they are already familiar >with (or, if they aren't familiar with a programming langauge, learning >one for scripting Abi would be a much more effective use of time than >learning an Abi-specific one). It would also be a lot less work for the >developers to go with a standard solution like guile, so that the AbiWord >developers would not have to go and implement a sub-optimal scripting >language when great ones already exist. > >Before you flame me, please read the guile page. It explains a lot of this >stuff. I am expecting the luddites to not agree with me ;). > >I would say that I want AbiWord to be the Emacs of word processors, but >because of the imagery of ugliness and frustration that may invoke, I >won't ;-). > > >Aaron Lehmann
Eric W. Sink, Software Craftsman SourceGear Corporation eric@sourcegear.com
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