"About half a year ago I was looking around me and seeing stagnation in the GNOME community. I was concerned that GNOME had lost its momentum and that we were just making boring incremental releases that added very little new functionality. I think I was very wrong. I'd like to take this time to list some things that are happening right now in the GNOME community that have me very excited. These are the projects that are actively improving the future of the GNOME desktop." Let's hope a punctuation checker will be part of GNOME too. One Aaron is enough.
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Member since:2005-07-22
You know more about language bindings for KDE than I do though. Can you elaborate on why the situation there is worse than on Gnome? It seems to me that the bindings (Ruby, Python, etc) are in fairly good shape.
Yes, technically the Qt bindings for Java, Python, Ruby, C# are in excellent shape. But there are only bindings for Ruby, C# and Python in prospect for KDE4 (nobody is currently working on KDE4 java bindings).
Based on KDE3 usage (of Python and Ruby) there are about 10x as many users of the Qt only bindings as the KDE ones. But with the Sugar project, the Gnome project has built an entire environment around PyGtk and that is way ahead of anything the KDE project have done with bindings. That doesn't mean PyGtk is technically better than PyKDE, just that nobody has done that much with PyKDE.
PyQt has certainly been used for a large number of serious projects, and it is the Qt/KDE binding that QtJambi, QtRuby or the C# Qyoto bindings need to measure up to.
Member since:
2005-09-21
It's not that it's particularly hard to learn, I'm sure most programmers won't have any trouble learning it, but it's just another thing to learn. Especially for novice programmers that may have learned some Java or C in college, the more new stuff you pile on, the less likely they are to contribute.
You know more about language bindings for KDE than I do though. Can you elaborate on why the situation there is worse than on Gnome? It seems to me that the bindings (Ruby, Python, etc) are in fairly good shape.
Well, that's debatable. Openstep is certainly not very widely used on Linux, and MacOS is still more or less a niche platform as well. Also note that these technologies have stayed on the platforms they were written for. You don't see anyone developing with ObjC on Windows for example, even though it is theoretically nicer than, say C++.
No, but sometimes you want it a certain way for performance reasons.
Of course not, but free software depends on developers willing to spend time on it, and if you offer the side benefit of gaining marketable skills, you might entice more people.
Anyway, I'm not advocating that Vala shouldn't be developed, I'm just betting that it won't take off for those reasons.