OPL, if you remember, was the 'edit and run it on the device' programming system for old Psions and UIQ/Series 80 smartphones, but OPL never made it past Symbian OS 7. With the steadily increasing maturity of Python (there's a new version 1.3.14 out now), I've been playing with my Musician mini-app again. read on for thoughts and the download...
Read on in the full article.
Is this article also the tombstone of OPL? Because the way you put it, it comes across as a fait accompli. OPL is well and truly dead?
I think so. Ewan and I have been *hammering* at the powers that be to put some money behind OPL to help Rick out for years and it's all been coming to nothing. Very sad, OPL won't even run on an old Nokia 6630, for goodness sake. Python's a very different beast in terms of syntax, but the overall effect is similar and it's actively being developed, with an enthusiast community that are also active etc....
I wonder if there is / will be a Python version for UIQ as well? Or what kind of effort would be involved in creating such a port?
(Python is my favourite programming language and the availability of Python for S60 brought me near to the point of purchasing an S60 device just for that; however then I decided to wait for the N95 and now instead of that I've fallen in love with the SE P990i ... So I'm seriously considering getting that one instead of one of the S60 devices).
Cheers,
--Tim
There seems to be at least some interest, and some action around a Python port for UIQ, as this recent thread over at NewLC shows:
http://forum.newlc.com/index.php/topic,12349.0.html
But without somebody pushing behind it, some heavyweight like Nokia, I cannot see enough people dedicate time and effort. I think porting something like Python to UIQ is a challenge, and only few people may be up to the task. Such good Symbian people are not very numerous, and all very busy elsewhere already...
For me that's one of the saddest point with OPL: All it would really take is 3 or 4 good programmers with time and ambition to keep it afloat. But it seems these programmers are just not there.
And the best example of this are good documentation and lots of easy-to-follow example programs. You can have as many ace Symbian C++ programmers working on the Pyton interpreter and the support libraries as you want, but without documentation and examples targetted at the hobbyist programmer, all that effort will be wasted anyway.
Sander van der Wal
www.mBrainSoftware.com