[Freecats-Dev] Re: Interface/vote

[Charles Stewart]

Some thoughts:

  - If what we build is good enough, people will switch
  tools and come to us, especially if we are nice enough
  to provide 2-way migration tools.  So the fear of Trados
  and wordfast gaining too much momentum is illusory, not
  real.

  - I am more worried about lock-in, especially wrt. the
  Python programming language.  It is an excellent tool
  for doing quick hacks that need OO, but it behaves almost
  completely unlike any other programming language in its
  semantics.  If the reference implementation is Python,
  we will find it difficult to support programmers who loathe
  Python (and they do exist).

  - I am all for a Java implementation.  Java has excellent
  libraries, and many PLs can target the JVM, including
  python, tcl and Scheme.  The recent brouhaha about "java
  is inefficient, even Sus says so" applies *only* to Sun's
  own JVM.  IBM's JVM is better, and we can compile to native
  C using gcc+CLASSPATH.

  - I am assembling an argument that we will need to handle
  hierarchical structure to get results with German->English
  translation.  More to follow, not necessarily all that soon.

Charles