[e-lang] a few notes about E install/basic usage

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

Folks:

I just tried to install E again.  First I tried compiling from  
source, which failed, and I didn't diagnose why (yet) but instead  
downloaded the "pure j" tarball.  I executed my old inst-e.bash  
script, and it complained that it couldn't find a "dist" directory,  
so I mkdir'ed a dist directory and moved everything except for inst- 
e.bash into it and then, I was glad to see, inst-e.bash just worked.

Then I studied the Walnut on the wiki, which was very nicely written  
and organized.  "rune" starts up a lot faster on my modern 2+ GHz  
Intel Core Duo 2 than it did on my old 867 MHz PowerPC, and the  
responsiveness when interactively experimenting with the interpreter  
is a lot more satisfying.

I finally hit an irritating snag and stopped for now.  This was when  
I wanted to import some E code from a file into the interpreter.  To  
do so, according to Walnut [1], I need to import my module as  
something like <import:com.yourdomain.e.makeQueue>.  For starters,  
this irritates me in several different ways:

1.  It smells of Java.  I hate that smell.

2.  It inserts a globally scoped and human-readable (and therefore  
insecure) namespace between my file, sitting here in the current  
working directory, and my interpreter, running here in the current  
working directory.  This is a bad idea.

3.  It adds hassle.  I hate hassle.

4.  After I held my nose and went through the hassle of mkdir "/ 
System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/lib/ 
ext/emakers" and symlink my file so that it is reachable from that  
directory, then it still didn't work.


Over-all, though, I am very encouraged about the state of E!  The  
"download/build/install/configure" time has dropped from hours to  
minutes, and the launch-interpreter time has dropped from 30 seconds  
to 5 seconds, and the "learn how to do basic programming" time has  
dropped from half an hour to minutes.  I enjoyed playing with E this  
time, and I'll probably do it again soon.


Regards,

Zooko

[1] http://wiki.erights.org/wiki/Walnut/Ordinary_Programming/Emakers