[E-Lang] E Project, Documentation, and new programmers

[steve jenson]

MarkM and I had a conversation earlier today regarding E programming, 
OpenCola, and my troubles as one of the few people who actually try and use
the language to write real projects in. 

The first issue that I'm having is how the language seems to be in
a near constant state of flux. This is to be expected of a language
that's not yet reached a stable release (meaning something worthy of a
1.0 label).  It's also to be expected that people won't want to develop
in a language that appears to be changing. This shouldn't be surprising
to anybody. The idea of having to port my code for every new release
isn't something that sits well with me and so I'll avoid developing in it.

How this fits into OpenCola is that we're not going to be building
production code on top of a rapidly shifting language. We want to wait
until a stable 1.0 (or equivalent) release is around.

The second issue I'm having is the lack of documentation outside of
javadoc'd API's and E in a Walnut.

I know that Dan Moniz has talked about starting an E Documentation Project,
similar to the Linux Documentation Project. To be honest, if it wasn't for
the LDP, I believe that Linux would be a rarely used OS today.

The E language is also in a serious need for such documentation. Marc
Stiegler has done some excellent work with EiaW but that's only the
beginning, we can't give somebody a racecar and no manual and expect
them to know how to drive it, they'll go buy an economy car instead. 


These are my observations, please take them at face value.

steve


-- 
steve jenson <stevej@sieve.net> http://sieve.net/
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