[CMake-Promote] Re: Language barrier

[Brandon J. Van Every]

E. Wing wrote:

>1) Make Lua (or whatever Python, Ruby, foo-mainstream language) a
>secondary language and continue to support both the current CMake
>language and the new one. There might be considerations to support
>additional languages in the future as well which would be hard coded
>directly into CMake. (None of the interprocess stuff.)
>  
>
I just want to add my $0.02 that this is not a marketing / promotion 
discussion.  It's heavy duty planning of basic technology.  As such, it 
should be aired on the main CMake list, where more eyes can be put on 
the technical problems and more opinions made known.  I am in no way an 
advocate of Stop Energy http://www.userland.com/whatIsStopEnergy but I 
do feel that some basic questions, like "What is a language needed for, 
what will it solve?" should be addressed by the users.  Is it a real 
need or a perceived need / neato keen feature?  Anyways, [CMake] is 
where you're going to get your "Yeah, I will help you build this puppy!" 
recruits, which I presume you'll want / need.

CMake-Promote is really supposed to be about promoting what we've 
already got, or what we can do with minor tweaks.  We can't very well 
create a marketing campaign around a technology that's terribly involved 
and completely pie in the sky right now.  I hope you are all familiar 
with the pitfalls of "Build It, And They Will Come."  We should be 
focusing on the sleight of hand of getting people to come.

And BTW, you should also be doing basic research on what's out there in 
Lua build-land.  For instance, the Lua front-end for SCons.
http://luaforge.net/projects/hamster/  Let's hear what it can do that 
CMake can't, and vice versa.  And anything else you scare up with 
Google; that was just my 1st obvious hit.  If you want more grist for 
the mill of "build tools that do various things, some of them possibly 
having languages," here's a whole page of 'em:  
http://www.scons.org/cgi-bin/wiki/SconsVsOtherBuildTools

One thing you might take away from such a page, is that no one build 
tool is dominating.  Even SCons has competition from other Python 
tools.  So I do question the marketing wisdom of "What we really need is 
a language!"  More likely, what we really need is some marketing.


Cheers,
Brandon J. Van Every
"The pioneer is the one with the arrows in his back."
                          - anonymous entrepreneur