elementary-dev-community team mailing list archive

[Jakob Eriksson <jakob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2013-08-21 22:59, A. "Xylon" V. wrote:
> The thing about vala is that its simple enough to learn, but is still very
> powerful and is extremely fast. The best thing is that it was made for Gtk,
> which is perfect for elementary.
> 
> More languages would mean that we wouldn't have unity across the
> applications - I do however, think that this would attract developers,
> especially since vala does not have very good tutorials, or books.

That is an understatement. Not having support for other languages is
sort of insane.

Scenario:

I am a developer. I develop an application for Windows and, against
commercial reason, make a Linux version of it too. It's coded in a mix
of C++ and Python.

I think Elementary is just fantastic, so just out of love I want to make
my Linux app an Elementary version. I read the HIG and love it.

Then I go to http://elementaryos.org/docs/code on the FIRST page I read:

"If you're not familiar with Vala, we highly encourage you to brush up
on it before coming here."

Sorry say what? No, not going to happen. I can't redo my app in Vala,
even if I wanted to, because that means I can't run it on Windows. (Or
OSX, or iOS.)


The dev page should read something like "for Elementary core apps we use
Vala as a programming language. If you want to create your own
Elementary apps, we encourage you to try out Vala, which is a fantastic
language. If you want to use another language, that's fine too. Here are
example Hello World Elementary apps written in C++, Objective C, Python
and Ruby."


--jakob