[Kde-bindings] KDE/kdebindings

[Sebastian Sauer]

Richard Dale wrote:
>> uh? afaik there are no policies and never where cause it would be the
>> dead of any kind of foss-project. guess it's not a matter of 'allowed'
>> (as in somebody needs to ok something) but more of 'whats possible' (as
>> in how could such a kplugin-based binding be integrated without the need
>> to add dirty hacks to plasma itself (what in turn would need such a 'ok'
>> :-) ).
> Well Aaron says that he can't see any point in writing KDE programs in any
> other language than C++, as the only advantage he can see is that you
> don't need to compile.

Well, it's his view and we just have another view. I had a similar 
mail-exchange with him a few months back and just came to the conclusion that 
we agree to disagree there and did not try to future investigate this since 
evangelism makes only fun on success :-)

> I
> sometimes have to take a ruby app, and code it in C++ instead to see
> whether some bug in ruby-specific. When I do that it just seems so painful
> compared with doing it in Ruby.

Guess it depends on the use-case. If it comes to e.g. image-processing I would 
always prefer C rather then C++, Python, Ruby, ... while I never would use 
C/C++ for e.g. server-side web-stuff (I still wonder ebay doesn't agree 
there) or batch-processing/automation-tasks (seems all distributions agree 
there).

Same for the desktop. C++ specially combined with Qt is very good and powerful 
but still far away from RAD compared to QtRuby/PyQt which are able to 
increase my productivity by at least a factor of 5 if not more.

> I routinely use irb to try little things 
> out when I'm coding something in Ruby - the whole way of going about
> writing an app 'feels' very different to me.

yes, same here (not irb but the 'feels' different). imho the limitations of 
static languages like C++ or Java as well as missing high-level functionality 
like e.g. the regexp-power of Perl, array-handling in Python or the pure and 
real OO-concept of Ruby are part of the reason not even taken the runtime 
manipulation / introspection into account.

> My plasma stuff didn't need any hacks to plasma because it couldn't tell
> it was running Ruby.

Fantastic! :)

> I agree that following the standard Plasma packaging 
> convention for non-C++ languages is certainly a good idea, and probably
> using the ScriptEngine api will have advantages in the future. I'll try
> and get a ScriptEngine/Korundum based binding done in the playground,
> rather than in kdebindings itself - I've thought about it a bit and it
> will be possible to get pretty much the same api as I had before with a
> bit of work.

Even more great to hear.

>> > The KDE community doesn't actually have any beginner ruby programmers,
>> > only intermediate and advanced, and so while a dead simple interface is
>> > good for JavaScript or BASIC, it isn't needed for Ruby.
>>
>> to sum it up: What is advanced in JavaScript is pre-beginners in Ruby,
>> hehe
>> :) Sorry, failed to resist.
> Yes, maybe ruby programmers are a bunch of snobs.
> 
> Actually I think JavaScript is an interesting language, and there are some
> libraries like Prototype, Dojo and JQuery that actually give you a very
> nice programming environment. So there are certainly many advanced
> JavaScript programmers, but there are so many more JavaScript programmers
> that on average they are beginners.

Well, for me a very important part of a language is what you are able to do 
with it. There is just no cpan-like collection of modules around for 
JavaScript and in my eyes that language just didn't left it's original 
purpose to run on client-side combined with a browser yet. That may change 
next few years but I don't see that happen any time soon. Well, we will 
see :)