[Geany-Devel] Let's use Vala

Steven Blatnick steve8track at xxxxx
Mon Nov 11 23:35:58 UTC 2013


Just to elaborate my "sources" ;-)

Personal Experience:

    I suppose I should elaborate that the added complexity could be a
    result of having a mixture of old and new languages by trying to get
    them to work together so as not to lose all legacy features while
    migrating.

    Without trying to hurt any company's reputation, I work or worked at
    a company where the main code base was perl, but now they prefer
    Java.  They couldn't just remove all of the legacy code, so getting
    the two languages to work together makes the code complicated.  The
    other problem is they have adopted several different frameworks over
    the years, from JSF, JSP, to GWT running on various different
    services from apache (for the perl), tomcat4, tomcat6 (at the same
    time!), etc.  This may not match up well with vala, since it appears
    vala is much more c++ compatible.  Also, this project is a web
    service, which requires migrating between the technologies without
    downtime and without losing any existing data, introducing it's own
    complexity to the migration.

    Basically the problem I see is that with each new direction (caused
    by changing opinions with new developers over the years, each with
    their own biases), we end up with a *technicolor-dream-coat of
    convoluted technology*.  I saw this at other jobs too, where each
    new pet feature/project introduced more dependencies and required
    different know-how than each of the prior work. While the projects
    work, they've become very complex with all the passing between the
    various architectures/structures/technologies. Scrambled eggs, if
    you will.

Gedit:

    When gedit changed from using GTK2 to GTK3 between gedit2 and
    gedit3, they introduced some regressions.  They also required a
    complete rewrite of all plugins others had developed for the
    editor.  While the new plugin infrastructure is better, I
    re-evaluated what editor I was using because if I had to rewrite
    them anyway, then maybe I would do so for another editor.  Hence why
    I am writing plugins to use with geany :-)  I also noticed that
    gedit started to use more memory.

Gnome3/Unity:

    Not only did they re-write everything, abandon their user-base, and
    upset a lot of people, myself included, but they also introduced
    many regressions and lost a lot of features.  I realize we don't
    intend to change the principles of geany like they did, but making
    large code changes is bound to lead to us at least considering
    alternative ways of doing things, which in Gnome3's case wasn't
    always appreciated by the users.

    Really, the *Gnome Civil War* between the programmers and the users,
    as I like to call it, has been a real sore spot for me and for
    linux-kind ;-)

I realize these are not identical to switching to vala, but I present it 
as food for thought anyway.

I guess my concern is that for each time a project changes direction, 
the code risks introducing regressions, losing/alienating users, and 
requiring more dependencies.

Not to get too political, especially since this may be lost on some 
audiences, but not all "Change" is good change.  If we make any drastic 
changes, I suggest starting a new project so we don't essentially 
overwrite a current one like the Gnome guys did.

All that said, it sounds like nobody is planning that big of a change (I 
hope).

Thanks,

Steve


On 11/11/2013 03:31 PM, Matthew Brush wrote:
> On 13-11-11 08:38 AM, Steven Blatnick wrote:
>> [snip]
>>
>> Changing languages almost always adds complexity and my humble opinion
>> is that it should be avoided, but I also don't know enough about vala to
>> say how easy it would be to include it in development.
>>
>
> [citation needed]
>
> Like provide an example of a past experience/observation where a 
> project switched from a similarly low-level language to a similarly 
> high-level language where it added (rather than severely reduced) 
> complexity.
>
> Cheers,
> Matthew Brush
> _______________________________________________
> Devel mailing list
> Devel at lists.geany.org
> https://lists.geany.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devel

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