Re: gEDA-user: Switch gschem to another scripting language?

[Kai-Martin Knaak <kmk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:03:29 -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:

> On Nov 22, 2009, at 6:24 PM, you wrote:
>> 1.  There are lots of folks who whine about learning another language. 
>> "I already know TCL, so why should I learn Scheme?"  As John Doty says,
>> this attitude stinks.

The very same John D. complains about obscure C code in gnetlist and how 
this prevents him from fixing what he diagnoses a major shortcoming...


>> It implies that the person with this attitude
>> doesn't want to learn, which is a terrible attitude for a practicing
>> engineer.

Diagnosing groups of users wholesale a terrible attitude is not very 
constructive.


>>  I ignore those people since they whine about gEDA, but don't
>> actually contribute code.

Scaring away potential contributers is not a nice attitude either.


>    Agreed 100%.  I don't want my tools dumbed-down because some of

When it comes to scripting in geda, there is not much to  dumb down in 
the first place.


> the users are lazy and don't want to think.  We're not talking about
> video games here...we're talking about tools required to do one of the
> toughest forms of engineering in existence. 

We are talking about an application whose competitors have manged to deal 
with scripting in a way that users actually can and do use. IMO it is 
fair to ask the same from geda and pcb.


>> 2.  Some people think Scheme is hard.  It's not.  It *is* a functional
>> programming language (as opposed to a procedural language),

Ack, this is a major reason why none of the various lisp dialects never 
made it very far beyond academia. After all, it is much more natural to 
think of a script as a procedure, that does something, rather than a 
function, that acts on something.


>> so it requires the programmer to think in a different way than 
>> the usual "step 1, do this, step 2, do that" way they are probably
>> used to.

You want to educate users on how to think properly. What an attitude!

It is fine, if you think of scripts like functions rather than 
procedures. It is OK, if you build the geda tools to suit your needs. But 
please don't even try impose your way of thinking on everyone else.


>    I experienced exactly this.

I did not ;-)
Yes, I used a RPN calculator a lot at a time. However, I didn't miss 
postfix too much when the calculator went legs up and got replaced with 
an ordinary TI. 


>    To restate the point I made above in a different way, if someone
> is confused by Scheme's parentheses, they'll probably be confused by
> Ohm's law...and as such probably shouldn't be messing with an electronic
> design automation suite in the first place.  Leave them behind.

Let me frown on this attitude again. 
Developers should never, ever think of users as dumb creatures whose 
feedback needs to be ignored.


>> Nowadays, 10 years after gEDA was started, there are other interpreters
>> & languages available

perl, php, or python were already popular back in 1999.


>> However, since nobody has actually stepped up to embedd one of
>> those other interpreters into gEDA, we continue to use Scheme.

Nobody will step up to achieve something the current developers actively 
discourage.


> If someone pops up and replaces gEDA's Scheme with, say Python,

Stefans question was not "Why scheme rather than Python?". 
It was: "Why scheme rather than C"?


>    As far as the Scheme vs. Perl/Python/Ruby/whatever-is-cool-this-
> week I say "don't fix it if it isn't broken"

Did I miss something? Are there scripting capabilities in geda at all? 
Yes, I mean real scripting -- A framework that allows me to write an 
algorithm that produces a working schematic when fed to gschem. Or a 
script that inserts a bandwidth reduction cap between every opamp in the 
circuit, if its refdes is in the range U200-U500. Or a way to output a 
list of refdeses of the current selection? Or ...


>...and people whining about Scheme should grow a pair and spend the
> whopping twenty minutes it'll take them to pick up enough Scheme to 

Would you mind come down from this elitist attitude?


> be able to go nuts with their gEDA config files.

Again, this is not about scheme-like syntax in dumb config files. This is 
about the reason why large portions of geda internals are written in 
scheme. Please elaborate on this aspect.

---<(kaimartin)>---
-- 
Kai-Martin Knaak
Öffentlicher PGP-Schlüssel:
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