Some feedback from a Gosu user

[Uli]

Hello folks,

when was Gosu announced? About a year or so? I instantly liked the
language, and I am really trying to use it as much as possible. I am a
freelance consultant and software developer, and Gosu scripts are used
in operation in a couple of my projects, mostly for small interface
scripts between systems, also the web frontend of http://www.wikiweise.de
is plain Gosu.

So, I am one of the guys that are actively using the language, and I
want to give some feedback from the field.

From the language side, basically it gives me all I need. It's
flexible, it scales up and down, I have all Java libraries at my
fingertips and the dynamic type loader is something I was looking for
for years to be finally able to start with another thing I have in
mind.

I could do with better compiler error messages. Especially when using
templates the output is basically unusable.

However, what's absolutely causing a nightmare, is the lack of an
integrated development environment, namly the missing eclipse plugin.
That did work with older eclipse versions. Since I upgraded my eclipse
I am using some workaround that starts the build in Gosu editor. But
that thing is buggy, I can't click around from class to class. The
code completion is way behind what eclipse can do etc. It's better
then nothing, but still it's a pain.

In combination with that, since I don't have Eclipse support, I don't
have a debugger. I am print(..)ing all over the place. Bad. Very Bad.

Folks, the language is excellent. But, as Carson said somewhere, the
beauty of a static typed language is in the fact that tools can
operate on it. We need those tools. With the eclipse plugin I was 10
times as effective when programming with Gosu than without it. I had
times when I was really thinking of dumping Gosu as my "strategic"
language and defect to C#.

So, to make a long story short: If you really want to establish Gosu
in the field of programming languages (right now it's usage is
marginal), you *need* to get that Eclipse plugin working again. Of
course I do not know where Guidewires strategic interest was in
originally opening up that language. But to make that strategy work, a
"coming really soon now" is not enough. Nor is an IntelliJ-plugin.
That might be useful internally for Guidewire applications, but to
gain critical mass, you need to support Eclipse.

Uli

[Carson Gross]

Hi Uli,

Thanks a bunch for your extensive feedback, and for taking the plunge on Gosu before we really had much infrastructure available for you.

To answer your first question: Gosu has been open source for a year now.

To answer your second point: we agree 1000% that an IDE is necessary for Gosu development.  We have chosen, however, to focus on IntelliJ, rather than Eclipse, because IntelliJ has a more open API that dovetails well with one of the core strengths of Gosu: The Open Type System.  I'll let Dumitru (IJ lead) or Scott (language lead) comment more extensively on that topic if they wish.

Note that IntelliJ now has a free and open source version, just like Eclipse:

  http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/

We intend at some point to revisit the Eclipse support (and perhaps open source the plugin so the community can contribute) but there is no timeline for that currently, and, as a small little tech company trying to make a living in a big, bad world, we are of course resource constrained.

The next release of Gosu is imminent and, at that point, you will be able to use Gosu in its fully armed and operational form, so long as you are willing to give IntelliJ a try and put up with the inevitable 1.0 issues.  Dumitru, Scott and the entire team at Guidewire have been cranking incredibly hard on this and they've done amazing work.

Thanks again for looking at Gosu and also for your patience.  I'm pumped on this next release and I hope it delights everyone.

Cheers,

Carson

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[Brian Chang]

Correction: Gosu has been partially open source for about a year now, in the form of a source zip for gosu-core-api.jar.  We do have plans to put the full source on a public source control host such as GitHub.

--
Brian
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[Carson Gross]

Ah, you people and your precision...  ;)

[Peter Rexer]

I for one am eagerly awaiting that IntelliJ plugin that makes working in Gosu for me possible.  I'm pretty eager to get my hands on it as soon as you release it.

And, while there are a bunch of people out there that prefer Eclipse, I have not heard too much resistance from even my Eclipse die-hard buddies about downloading a free version of IntelliJ, if that means getting a good IDE with all the things that programmers really need. 

Maybe I should confess that I'm not really a programmer type, but a quasi-programmer.  I don't write code that works in production environments, or in enterprises.  I write code that runs on my laptop to try to show people how to write code.  I'm sure that you hard-core programmers that edit in vim or emacs, can figure out how to code in Gosu with your home-hacked-together toolkit.   I can only say that I'm envious of you guys that have enough brainpower to do that.  I'm so damn reliant upon IDE's, and so impatient with my own stupid errors when I don't have an IDE, that I rarely bother to write any code in a text editor.

I suspect there may be plenty of others out there that will try Gosu when the IJ plugin comes out.   Just let us know when that is.  Blog, tweet, G+, Facebook, and send out an email on this mailing list when it is ready to be downloaded.

-Peter