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

[Dave McGuire <mcguire@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Nov 22, 2009, at 9:24 PM, Kai-Martin Knaak wrote:
>>    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.

   I think gEDA is very scriptable.  Look at the amazing stuff Karel  
did with the RONJA project.

>>> 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.

   Yeah, it's only in trivial things like the Yahoo Store, AutoCAD,  
and emacs. ;)

>>    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.

   I think in some cases they should.  There is a such thing as a  
user who is TOO unwilling to learn.  TOO unable to comprehend  
concepts.  TOO much in need of dumbing-down and handholding.

   Let's not lose sight of the fact that this is a technical system.   
We're not talking about an email program or a word processor here.   
This is an electronic design automation software suite!  These users  
are supposed to be technical in the first place!

>>> Nowadays, 10 years after gEDA was started, there are other  
>>> interpreters
>>> & languages available
>
> perl, php, or python were already popular back in 1999.

   Perl's unfortunate proliferation notwithstanding, I first (as a  
professional developer) started seeing Python popping up in obscure  
places more like 2001 or so.  I'd not have called it "popular" until  
a couple of years after that.  But that's immaterial.

   Scheme has been around for 35 years, and Lisp has been around for  
more than half a century.  Will Python, as nice as it is, really be  
around in five decades?  Three?  I doubt it.  And for the sake of the  
overall health of the computer science world, I sure hope Perl isn't.

   I suppose that's immaterial too, but since you mentioned it..   
(and so did I...)

>>    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 ...

   Well ok, you've got me there...but I have no doubt that such  
functionality is coming, if it's not already there.

>> ...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?

   It's not elitist at all.  If I can pick up Scheme in twenty  
minutes, certainly anyone here can.

>> 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.

   Well I can't elaborate on that, as I wasn't involved in the  
decision to do so.  But I can see how it's advantageous.  One way in  
particular that comes to mind is in the complex scripting behavior  
that you mentioned above ("insert a bandwidth reduction cap between  
every opamp..").  It's certainly much more practical to implement  
something like that if the high-level data structures are visible to  
the scripting language in their native representation.

                -Dave
>


-- 
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL



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