New user - general thoughts

[Marek Janukowicz]

Hi everyone

First, I want to welcome new maintainer :) Hopefully you will bring some life 
into this presumably dead project.

Recently I found out about Sather (I knew the language existed for at least a 
few years, but never get a chance to learn more about it) and I have quite a 
few thoughts both about its pros and cons.

I like:
- clean syntax
- easy interfacing with C
- working compiler (at least with simple cases I tried :))
- iterators

I miss/dislike (or my knowledge about those is lacking):
- namespaces (is the only way to simulate namespaces is to use class name 
prefixes?)
- inline closures, a'la Eiffel agents or Ruby blocks; generally closures are 
extremely important for me and I love the fact they are present in Sather, but 
I really dislike the syntax
- poor libraries, but that's to be expected for a language with such a small 
user base
- documentation for *.module files. I understand they are supposed to describe 
directory contents, but I'd really like to see some docs on them

I'm unsure of:
- interface/implementation inheritance system. It seems clean on a first 
glance, but I have the impression it kind of gets into the way with more 
complicated designs. Also the fact that you can only inherit from abstract 
classes and that abstract classes cannot contain any implementation code makes 
me feel I'd need to create way too many classes for a moderately-complicated 
system (compared to other OO languages) and class names like $SOMETHING and 
SOMETHING_INCLUDE really seem awkward to me. But maybe I just need to get used 
to that.

Please bear in mind I might have just presented some misconceptions above, as 
the only reliable source of information about Sather I found is the (very nice 
indeed) tutorial. So please be forgiving and help me understand the language 
better.

I'm quite limited on my time, but if I really get into Sather I will 
definitely spare some for it :) I'd rather not work on compiler itself, but I 
really like making libraries and I see lots of gaping holes in this area, 
which means there is a lot for me to do :)

-- 
Marek Janukowicz