part i - before lookingfirst i've heard of it. people always make new languages, and most of them (for reasons mr. kauler must be familar with, and that i've talked about many, many, many times) are not going to be simple, easy languages like python (or ruby.) he's somewhat in two directions when it comes to choosing languages, because he loves simplicity but hates basic (i'm beginning to understand that much, most "basic" languages these days are more messy than fun or easy) but he's also a very big fan of tcl/tk, which (for the sake of puppy,) i took a serious look at. and never again...
i'm really not a fan of puppy (at all) but
i was for at least half a year, until i figured out their hype machine is really powerful and they could make you believe they invented sliced bread. (having seen all the commercials for apple in the 80's i should know better.) but we're talking about genie and easy languages.
as i said, people always make new languages, so it's a good thing that some of them are easy and friendly, because ideally they all would be. i've read 4 books about python this week, and i had a poke through a ruby intro thanks to (gandalf? lancegary? i don't know) and i'll have a look at genie right now.
that said i won't disagree with kauler's conclusions but his reasoning about python raises an eyebrow. complaining that python is slow is kind of like complaining that midgets are short. it's true, but short people do just fine and unlike his article would have you think, python isn't supposed to be used in places where you need something faster... yet people use it all the time for almost everything, and unlike older languages where you're encouraged to find silly ways of making it faster, in python that's considered a last resort.
compiling it is certainly not the answer. what he's right about is using a faster language when a faster language is needed. i'll have a look at genie, i'm glad you mentioned it. (but if it's anything like tcl/tk, i'm going to run away from it as fast as i can.)
part ii - after lookingokay, i've been looking at barry kauler's tutorials (which are not bad) and at
http://live.gnome.org/Genie which is no worse than the tutorials.
first impressions: yeah, it's kind of python. (i'd rather use ruby.) it has to be compiled, which means it produces binaries (cool) but also you have to get the compiler running, which is fine if someone has compiled it for your platform, but it's going to be more likely that you have a python interpreter available. that said, i'd rather rig a genie setup than pyexe.
when you think of most of the things he codes, it's a wonder that barry kauler needs something faster, but if he wants something faster, i guess that's what he wants. (i'm sure that speed tempts us all.) like he, i use bash when it suits my needs and if bash was as friendly as python, i probably wouldn't have any use for python. why even bother with bash? well, it's everywhere.
"it's available" can certainly be a circular argument, but it's a very practical argument. obviously some things won't do, if i could be happy using the tiny c compiler, i'd be able to write scripts that compile themselves on use and then run very fast, and then delete the compiled version. and it would be easier to setup than genie.
but i don't do that, because i'd rather use (and share and teach) python, which i fell in love with as part of the sugar on a stick distro, which does everything with python.
all of that is (mostly) irrevelant if genie is more tedious to use once it's setup. the idea that you have to use tabs or explicitly name the indentation is just... i'm going to use the word "stupid," even though i wanted to avoid it. whitespace almost kept me from appreciating python but it's not that bad! if tab was on the right side of the keyboard i would settle for tab. i'd rather use space- four times- (in python you can use tabs instead, just don't mix tabs and spaces.) this matters to me. (eh.) python is less demanding, genie's indentation is absurd.
the rest of the language is a lot easier than i don't know, c++, but i wouldn't say it's as easy as python. there are no colons where i'd expect them to be required (a bonus if you like simple token languages- which i do- such as aurelbasic) but all in all i'm not getting the "wow" i got when i first looked at python or even ruby. when i saw ruby i thought "wow, that really does look very clean and easy." when i look at genie i think "eh, i guess it could be a lot easier than c++." but i don't want to get into that old argument
i say, if you find genie easy, it's a lot easier to read than some compiled languages- noting that there have been very easy compiled languages (such as quickbasic.) it shouldn't matter whether a language is compiled or interpreted, per se, but it obviously does matter, and people often give up ease of use for a more difficult language that makes nice binaries.
i say that if you find genie an easy way to get a job done, maybe it's worth adding to your tools, but if you don't find it easy or worth the trouble, i won't be too surprised. then again (unlike python) it's very young and it would only be fair to have another look at genie in a year. sorry i know this is obscenely long, but i got excited about the topic. i demand it's better than no reply at all
edit: (wow! but not too much better- this is like how i used to do replies)
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