built-in scripting languages

Mon Jan 22 23:19:58 CET 2007

On Jan 22, 2007, at 2:49 PM, Andraž 'ruskie' Levstik wrote:
> Personaly by default there should be none. And let the user decide 
> what he
> wants. For example I prefer ruby over perl, lua or python and I 
> like using
> bash scripts for a lot of stuff. So having lua on my system would 
> be more
> or less pointless as I don't use it myself.

I want to agree with this, but I'd like to point out one small 
problem with it: if you have an app written in one of these 
languages, you have to install the whole interpreter anyway. And 
god forbid you should have two apps, both of which are written with 
the same interpreter, both of which install their own (possibly 
conflicting) version of it.
So in order to agree with this, we nevertheless have to talk about 
the problem: how do we ensure that if an end-user wants to run an app 
written in python, and another written in ruby, and a third written 
in python, that they get exactly two interpreters installed on their 
Neo, and not three?
There are a couple of ways to solve this problem, but the point is 
that if you just leave it open and let nobody solve it, you may wind 
up with an unpalatable result for the end-user. And the result for 
the end-user is important - if the Neo is only useful to geeks, it 
can't accomplish its stated goals.