[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Python?

["Anthony J. Stuckey" <astuckey@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Nov 22, 2003 at 04:53:46PM -0800, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> I have a .sig about that.  Discussion has been intelligent so far, and
> there's no "war" for me here.  Having just done a dog-and-pony show with
> the Xconq crowd, I didn't come in here thinking I was likely to convince
> anyone.  Rather, I wanted to see if I would be pleasantly surprised.
> Mainly, I wanted to better understand why C developers stick to their
> guns.  That agenda has certainly been productive for me.

        In a large part, I write in C because a) I know it, b) it irritates
me less than many other languages, and c) I don't write the kind of
complexity that requires BS like Scheme's call-with-current-continuation.

        In my day job, almost all of the code that I write is in perl.  I would
not claim to know perl nearly as well as I know C.  Things that other people
seem to think are fundamental to perl problem solving (map(), for instance)
I have only the barest knowledge of.  However, it does what I need it to do
(mostly logfile parsing and soon to be XML-ish processing) far better (and
more concisely) than C.  I don't love strcmp() *that* much.

        I have no doubt that Freeciv *could* be written in Python, or even
Perl.  I don't see a need for either as a goal.  I'm certainly not the kind
of Uber-hacker who's going to do the rewrite (or even perl-sdl-client) to
prove the point.

        Frankly, what most open-source games need (including Freeciv) is
polish.  Compare, for instance, the Escape Velocity line of games
(http://www.ambrosiasw.com) with Vega Strike.
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/vegastrike/)  One's one of the best games
I've ever seen, with entertaining story lines, polished graphics, a great
trading-game simulation, and the flaw of a silly real-time flight simulator
bolted on.  The other one is a far worse implementation of a similar
concept.  I'll leave you to guess which is which.  The difference is as
plain as Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights versus nethack.