[Freecats-Dev] Free CATS development tools - a shift

[Henri Chorand]

Hi all,

I've continued to read programming language comparison benchmarks and I 
talked about it, mostly with Julien and Kirk. My conclusion is that my 
initial ideas were right, except that we will be probably glad to modify 
a few options.

I continue to believe assets found in Tcl are the ones we need:
- Ease and speed of development
- Maximum portability
- Ability to glue together components written in other languages.

That said, there are some arguments against Tcl:
- Not among the short list of most popular tools
- Language documentation may be improved
- Limited amount of existing modules of interest for us.

So I propose to drop Tcl and choose Python instead:
- It has the same assets as quoted above
- Its performance level is a bit better
- Its code is highly readable
- It should be as flexible as Tcl, but a bit more robust and scalable
- Excellent documentation in English & French (I was really impressed)
- Large and very active community of users
- It should be even better to integrate Java modules if need be
- It can also use Tk, the portable graphical user interface builder 
(Julien, who began designing our translation client's GUI, was quite 
relieved to hear this).

Another, possible choice would be Perl, but it looks quite less 
maintainable (also see links below).

See for yourself at http://www.python.org

I don't want to say any bad things about Tcl. I believe it will remain a 
tool of choice for smaller-sized projects, and a nice one to work with. 
It's only that I believe people like me (with an average programming 
experience) will learn Python faster and will, maybe, benefit from a 
larger community.


Here are a few links that helped me to suggest this move:

From Guido van Rossum, Python's inventor
http://www.python.org/doc/essays/comparisons.html

From Eric Raymond (Why Python?)
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3882

From Richard Stallman (Why you should not use Tcl)
http://sdg.lcs.mit.edu/~jchapin/6853-FT97/Papers/stallman-tcl.html


And... to David Welton:
David, maybe you'll feel slightly disappointed. Whatever - I wanted to 
thank you for your kind feed-back, which really encouraged us and helped 
many of us, including me, to start seeings things more clearly. I really 
hope you'll continue dropping ideas when you feel like it and patiently 
answering often newbie-level issues.


Regards,

Henri