[Gambas-user] Gambas Future or what kind of Gambas we want.

[Rob Kudla]

On 01/24/2014 07:18 PM, Carl Nilsson wrote:
> Rob: ...and so maybe a million new users get introduced to Python - 
> already loaded in the Wheezy RPi distro, not Gambas.  If you want to 
> secure the long term future of Gambas, one of things that must be done 
> is to attract new users.  These new users, like me, are just the ones 
> that don't have the necessary skills or experience to install and update
> Gambas on these platforms.  These architectures are a wave of the
> future.

First of all, as someone who abandoned Gambas app development in favor of
what we now call HTML5 years ago, you're appealing to the wrong guy with
that argument. Python is a capable enough language, though I personally
dislike it due to its retarded indentation requirements (if meta-Q destroys
my program logic, your language has a problem, not me). Bottom line, I
don't have a horse in this race anymore; I'm actually waiting for Benoît to
let me know when to send him the transfer codes for the gambasdoc.org
domain that I've been hosting for the last 9 years since that server is
likely to disappear soon. Desktop apps just haven't been a priority to me
for a long time.

Second, I would argue that the Raspberry Pi isn't "the future", cheap
Chinese Android devices are. Gambas being ported to Android isn't going
to happen anytime soon as despite having a Linux kernel, Android doesn't
even have the most basic GNU libraries (or a replacement for those) that it
would need to be POSIX compliant. Education might be moving toward ARM for
desktops, at least in CS/CSE programs where kids are meant to be hacking,
but the business world isn't, and that's where most of us are coming from.
Most of us have ARM phones and x86/x64 desktops. I have a couple cheap
Chinese Android sticks hooked up to TVs too. I had hopes to use them as
desktop replacements but in their current state (early 2013 vintage)
they're really not. I could put Debian on them but they wouldn't even have
2D video acceleration and I might not be able to get back. (I write my
Android apps in Java, for the most part. What a terrible, verbose,
top-heavy language, but if you use anything else you're stuck with a subset
of the platform's capabilities and good luck finding support.)

As a corollary, even if Gambas is available on those systems, as you say,
Python is installed by default and the Raspberry Pi project pushes it
pretty hard. Students sitting in front of RPis are going to get taught
Python unless their teacher is someone like me who strongly dislikes
Python, and I suspect Gambas isn't going to be the next thing on their
list.

Third, you can't install or update Gambas on a platform on which it doesn't
compile and run, and if you're one of "the ones that don't have the
necessary skills or experience to install and update Gambas on these
platforms", I would hope you'll shell out the 50 bucks to send your pet
hardware platform to someone who volunteers to make it work, or to Benoît
if it's a bigger job than patching out some Intel-architecture-specific stuff.

It isn't like there's a big red "Port to ARM" button that we've all refused
to push out of spite. The developers need the hardware and the time to
figure out what doesn't work and why. Apparently it compiles, because the
packages are available. I don't think any of us had heard it was broken at
runtime until someone reported it earlier in this thread. The bug has still
not been officially reported on http://code.google.com/p/gambas/issues/list
. Developers can't fix what they don't know about, especially if they don't
even own the hardware it fails on.

Isn't there a Raspbian support group or something that has people who know
how to read gcc error messages?

Rob