Re: Questions: Roadmap, Publicity/Grrovy, Regexps

Hi,

Sorry for not answering earlier. Luckilly Artem gave some good answers.

> Looking for a new, lightweight language to write experiments in, I recently
> came upon Nice once more. What a _nice_ language!

:-)

> I was wondering:
> 
> 1) The RoadMap doesn't mention any dates. Is there a planned release date?

There is a planned release date for 0.9.10 now: that was last Friday ;-)

I won't give a planned date for 1.0. If you look at the roadmap, most of the 
planned features are now implemented in 0.9.10. The main two features I see 
before 1.0 are the visibility system and properties (and I have some 
preliminary work on visibility already). So I think there will be a few more 
releases before 1.0, but hopefully they can happen at a faster rate than the 
last one.

If people have ideas about other things that need to be done, this is the 
moment to speak up. There are already 27 feature requests that were filed on 
the sourceforge page, and they will all be considered (but some might be 
postponed or rejected of course). I actually think that we should make better 
use of the feature request tracker facility. I'll add a link to it from the 
main page. If there is no objection, I will also set it up so that feature 
requests are forwarded to this list, so that all of you can be aware of what 
is being discussed and comment if you wish.

> 2) Why the lack of publicity? Everyone is talking about Groovy, which is a
> nice language, but one that was hastely defined originally, and that now is
> going through a scary "design by comitee" process that can only make it
> worse. Why isn't people talking about Nice?

That's a big question! I won't try to analyse all reasons. Probably part of 
the answer is in the nature of the language (more accessible, less ambitious 
in a way, because of dynamic typing), part of it in how loud supporters shout!

Nice being at a pre-1.0 version means that a few features are still missing 
(see above), and that the target audience is language enthusiats and early 
adopters, who can accept to find the occasional bug (we work hard to solve 
them as soon as possible, and often succeed!). But I certainly don't object to 
more publicity. I think Nice has already reached good quality. There are 
serious and commercial applications using it.

> 3) Still, Groovy implements some really nice ideas. One of them is making
> regular expressions first-class citizens through some syntatic sugar? Would
> the Nice designers considering adding regexp support to the language?

To make things more precise, could you give examples of what this would enable 
that cannot be achieved using regexp libraries?

Cheers,

Daniel



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