When the AbiWord project began, we invested a LOT of time and
energy into our decision to use JavaScript. Believe me, we
considered every credible option, and everyone's favorite language
was evaluated.
However, we didn't proceed to actually execute on the decision
we made. We didn't implement anything. In fact, we didn't
intend to do so immediately, since we consider scripting support
to be of secondary urgency.
The main reasons we invested the effort in the decision back
then were:
1. We knew that we did NOT want to reinvent a language from
scratch. We definitely want to integrate an existing code base.
2. We needed to choose our license before we did much of anything
else. The various legal incompatibilities between all the open
source licenses place restrictions on which bodies of code we
are free to use.
In other words, we forced ourselves to make a scripting
language decision because we thought we had to do so, because
we thought that said decision was linked to our license
decision.
We ended up choosing the GPL, with the intent to use the NGS
JavaScript engine. As I've said on the list before, Netscape's
decision to allow the use of their JS engine under the GPL
will force us to revisit this.
Furthermore, the landscape has changed in other ways. Python
has more momentum, and is a very nice language indeed. Perl
is ubiquitous. Tcl is a viable choice as well. Any of these
could be considered as an option, and all have licensing terms
which are compliant with the GPL. There are others as well.
However, we still don't regard scripting as an urgent matter.
We want to get the more important stuff done first. A word
processor with scripting but without bulleted lists is a
funny beast indeed.
The last round of language wars on abiword-dev was not
productive, and it was my fault that it happened.
I'd hate to see this list degenerate again into
something similar, all focused on a feature we're not
likely to be coding right away.
This list is an open list, and we do not intend to rule it
with a Draconian hand. We'll tolerate almost anything here
other than spam. This is why I began this note with the
word 'request' instead of the word 'insist'.
Furthermore, remember that AbiWord is open source. The
AbiSource staff serves a leadership and project coordination
function, but our license reflects a proactive choice to
NOT exercise absolute control over the community driven
development of this project.
So, with all of that said, the bottom line is this:
If you want to discuss the various possible choices for
scripting languages in AbiWord here on abiword-dev, we
won't bar you from the list. (Do please keep things
at least tangentially related to AbiWord. :-)) However,
your humble project leaders don't consider this an issue
of immediate urgency, and until we're ready to actually
make scripting a coded features, our efforts to be responsive
contributors to such discussions will probably be rather
anemic.
:-)
-- Eric W. Sink, Software Craftsman eric@abisource.com