Re: The fate of ob-asymptote.el

[Ihor Radchenko]

Jarmo Hurri <jarmo.hurri@iki.fi> writes:

>> The advantage of maintaining ob-asymptote.el in the main asymptote
>> repo is that people who are intimately familiar with the asymptote
>> features can directly contribute and enhance the Org
>> integration. Moreover, distributing together with the asymptote means
>> no headache with back-compatibility issues.
>>
>> Maintaining on Org side will have an advantage of using the latest
>> additions to Org babel features.
>>
>> I feel like it is more important to make use of the asymptote features
>> if its devs are going to be interested. Of course, IMHO.
>
> I have a very bad feeling about tying ob-asymptote.el with Asymptote,
> and I am trying to put my finger on this feeling. I think the problem is
> this one.
>
> ob-asymptote.el is coupled very loosely with Asymptote. Basically the
> only thing ob-asymptote.el requires from Asymptote is the ability to
> call the executable with some established parameters.
>
> Then again, ob-asymptote.el is coupled much more tightly with Org. It
> uses many more properties of Org (Babel) than of the Asymptote
> program.
>
> As a result, changes in Org are much more likely to affect
> ob-asymptote.el than changes in Asymptote. I think basic software
> development rules of thumb suggest that ob-asymptote.el should then be
> bundled with Org.

>From my point of view ob-asymptote.el is as bare bones as babel library
can be. It does not use any fancy Org babel features like sessions,
error display of converting the output to various :results output
options.

In contrast, it does a lot of work trying to convert Elisp types to
Asymptote in `org-babel-asymptote-var-to-asymptote`.

Of course, my view is a subject of discussion. Or maybe you have plans
to implement advanced Org babel features for Asymptote. IDK.

>From my point of view, any kind of new functionality in ob-asymptote.el
requires a deep knowledge about the Asymptote programming - the
knowledge most of the Org devs lack. At the same time, changes in Org
babel core functionality are unlikely to cause any issues in
ob-asymptote - we try our best to keep backwards compatibility with
third-party babel packages anyway.

Best,
Ihor