Hacker News Reader

Comment by firemelt | Hacker News Reader

I hope the ui not built with vala

Why do you hope so? Vala is a decent language which let's users build Gtk applications easily.

Because most people aren't going to learn yet another language for the privilege of being able to contribute to something.

If you are going to contribute to a Linux Desktop Environment, you are not the target audience for Elementary.

Elementary wants to be “the Apple of Linux”, to attract less-technical users and switchers from other OSes. Their development philosophy is similarly top-down: someone sets a “vision” and a small group of people gets to implement it. If you are a coder and you value bottom-up development, you should really look elsewhere.

https://elementary.io/get-involved

Yep, that page is perfectly ordered by priority: funding, free labour for annoying tasks, and only towards the end, if you really really have to, you can give us a hand under the hood or even (dead last! Why are you still here?!?) help with design.

Vala is probably the easiest way to work with Gtk+ anyway, so might as well be Vala if the stack is Gtk. I don't know Vala well, but wouldn't mind jumping in with it, scares me a lot less than Gtk in C.

Be that as it may, it was a mistake to roll a different language for this in the first place. It's not really useful for anything else, so unless you're totally dying to contribute to GNOME (very few people do), there's no reason whatsoever to learn it.

Vala is about as easy to learn as any language could ever be. If you have experience with Java, C++, C# or D you can probably already read 97% of Vala code. And if it’s your first statically typed language, it’s one of the simplest.

Plus, most people don’t know most languages, so no matter what you choose, most devs have a language barrier. Vala, again, is very easy to pick up — certainly easier than C or C++ and probably easier than Java/C#/D.

I am sad they didn't decide to build it with Objective C. It would have made sense given Objective C could work well with GTK, and Apples devs would have felt half at home. Swift would be cool nowadays. https://rhx.github.io/SwiftGtk/

New apps in the Pantheon system could I guess be written in any language.

Except that is hardly any usable Objective-C tooling outside Apple platforms.

GCC is stuck on a pseudo Objective-C 2.0 support.

clang does support the basic stuff, but there are no libraries.

Yeah, there is GNUstep, but it is like stuck on Pather level compatibility or something like that.

I wasn't even longing for the libraries, I think just the languages could lure over some Mac programmers to Elementary.

I'm not sure why you are getting downvoted, as this is a legitimate issue. If the authors want someone else but themselves to contribute to this MacOS clone, they should use a more common language.

Why not? Anything that helps not writing unsafe C code is a plus.

It is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com