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Oddly enough, I was just recently trying to play around with the PortableApps package of SWI Prolog, available here: https://portableapps.com/apps/development/

by athom 9y ago

Oddly enough, I was just recently trying to play around with the PortableApps package of SWI Prolog, available here: https://portableapps.com/apps/development/swi-prolog_portable https://portableapps.com/apps/development/swi-prolog_portabl... It's about the ONLY PortableApp that offers any kind of program development capability beyond text editing, that I could tell. No compilers, no interpreters outside of this and a couple of SQLite packages. Anyway, I pulled this one down, fired it up, and... no worky. I got a console, theoretically I could execute commands, but try and access the help or docs, and it bails out with an error, telling me xpce can't be loaded, because load_foreign_library/1 is not defined? At least half the menu commands failed with the same error, closing out the app in the process. Basically, the app is impossible to use. So, there's my answer, one that can be applied to many otherwise promising languages. Any system looking to gain traction really needs to go out of its way to Just Work; to make itself readily available, easily installable, immediately functional, and with clear documentation right at hand. You can carry on 'til you're blue in the face about lazy programmers unwilling to learn a simple build-and-install process, but with the ready availability of other environments that generally Just Work, there's really no excuse. At least, that's how I feel about it.

zmonx 9y ago
Please don't take the following as "lazy programmers unwilling to learn a simple build-and-install process": Please consider filing this as an issue with the SWI-Prolog team, to benefit everyone who runs SWI-Prolog as such an app. Please note that SWI-Prolog is free software and depends on such contributions or at least reports to work reliably on all platforms. Alternatively, there are also several commercial Prolog implementations with professional support to help you in case of difficulties.
stonemetal 9y ago
You only need a portable app version if it isn't a portable app by default. If I go grab the python zip for my platform it is already a "portable app" what is there for portable apps to do? The only dev environments I can think of that aren't portable by default are not free, so portable apps wouldn't be able to release them anyway.
bsznjyewgd 9y ago
But why try the "PortableApps" package of a program that isn't listed on that program's homepage instead of using that program's own executable installer listed on its homepage? Is it not possible that this "PortableApps" package broke the program?
mst 9y ago
apt-get install-ing it just worked for me, and there appears to be a non-portable-app windows installer here: http://www.swi-prolog.org/download/stable http://www.swi-prolog.org/download/stable I've linked your post to the ##prolog channel on freenode but I'm mostly a n00b so if at some point you want help figuring it out, you'd probably be better joining yourself and giving a more complete report.

by athom 9y ago

zmonx 9y ago

Please don't take the following as "lazy programmers unwilling to learn a simple build-and-install process": Please consider filing this as an issue with the SWI-Prolog team, to benefit everyone who runs SWI-Prolog as such an app. Please note that SWI-Prolog is free software and depends on such contributions or at least reports to work reliably on all platforms. Alternatively, there are also several commercial Prolog implementations with professional support to help you in case of difficulties.

stonemetal 9y ago

You only need a portable app version if it isn't a portable app by default. If I go grab the python zip for my platform it is already a "portable app" what is there for portable apps to do? The only dev environments I can think of that aren't portable by default are not free, so portable apps wouldn't be able to release them anyway.

bsznjyewgd 9y ago

But why try the "PortableApps" package of a program that isn't listed on that program's homepage instead of using that program's own executable installer listed on its homepage? Is it not possible that this "PortableApps" package broke the program?

mst 9y ago

apt-get install-ing it just worked for me, and there appears to be a non-portable-app windows installer here: http://www.swi-prolog.org/download/stable http://www.swi-prolog.org/download/stable I've linked your post to the ##prolog channel on freenode but I'm mostly a n00b so if at some point you want help figuring it out, you'd probably be better joining yourself and giving a more complete report.