Gnome Goes JavaScript

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 12:16 PM, Scott Elcomb <psema4-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I'd love to hear perspectives on this.  (I'm a little biased in that I
> actually like JavaScript and think this is the right way to go. ;-)

If we step *WAY* back, to 1994, when the 'war' began to make GNOME
scriptable, the fight was between Tcl and Lisp.
   http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0000.html

I'm rather disappointed that it has taken 18 years to get to the point
where it seems to make sense to integrate a scripting language into
GNOME so as to be able to 'do everything.'

I don't think JavaScript is actually a more horrible choice than Tcl
or Guile were, back then.

I don't think Tcl *or* Guile are options, today; both are still supported,
but only marginally.

The 'traditionally popular' scripting languages, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby,
would involve drawing in pretty large 'core libraries' that live at
the individual
OS level, which isn't a keen thing; that's expensive to have to integrate
into the framework.  JavaScript is more nearly 'self contained,' which
has merit, for sure, and I can't think of another language that has that.

Again, I'm just disappointed that it took 18 years to get around to it...
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