“Apple did such an interface in the early 90s called the Open
Scripting Architecture. It’s a very powerful idea, and reasonably
well implemented, in fact I understand that Python supports it on
the Mac, and Frontier treats Python as a first class scripting
language, and look at the distance in license philosophy betw
Frontier and Python. Stallman can’t bitch, but the user can’t tell
the difference. It appears as if the two programs are the
same.”
“I’ve often thought it was sloppy that so much integration in
Unix goes on at the source level. It’s quicker in the short term,
but too heavily reliant on developers. If there were some
well-defined interfaces that did runtime binding, users would get
exponential power. Why should a spreadsheet only support Python?
Don’t some people want tcl, and others (shudder) want Perl?”
“Think about it. This might be one of those ideas your Mac
brothers could teach you about, and it could revolutionize the open
source world and render the GPL less threatening.”