The People Behind KDE: Alexander Kellett

Monday, 26 April 2004  |  Tink

This week The People Behind KDE travels back to the 'Low Lands' or Netherlands where we visit the guy who is known for his 'gruesome green shorts', wants to marry into a KDE family and describes himself as 'very weird'. Are you anxious to find out more about this colorful personality? Than read all there is to know about Alexander Kellett!

Comments:

Netherlands - gerd - 2004-04-26

I heard KDE will also get translated to Frysk, a dutch regional language. So, does he speak Frysk or low saxon?

Re: Netherlands - lypanov - 2004-04-26

unfortunately not, only been in nederland for the last 3 years so i'm not even very good at nederlands itself yet :P cheers, Alex (half dutch half english)

Re: Netherlands - Axel - 2004-04-26

What about esperanto...

Re: Netherlands - atrink - 2004-04-26

I am sad too, that Esperanto is not part of the distributions anymore! Think about it: EU is getting larger with 1.5. and we need a really good common language!

Ah, Bindings!! - Martin - 2004-04-26

...I'm still waiting for... ...drumroll... a FreePascal binding!!! ;-) Well, I know this is still far away but this would be WAY cool. FreePascal is now very advanced, supports inline assembler code, compiles extremely fast, and more. If only there would be some way to write KDE apps with it.

Re: Ah, Bindings!! - Spy Hunter - 2004-04-26

What are you waiting for? I hear KDE's systems for generating language bindings are second to none. If you want FreePascal bindings, and nobody else is working on them, then get cracking! FreePascal isn't going to bind itself you know :-)

Re: Ah, Bindings!! - Richard Dale - 2004-04-26

"I hear KDE's systems for generating language bindings are second to none" Yes, it would be possible to generate Pascal code from the KDE headers via the kalyptus tool, assuming FreePascal has OO features. But can FreePascal interface directly to C++, or does it need to go via C bindings? If so that's a major problem. And as Pascal isn't a dynamic language, you wouldn't be able to use the 'SMOKE' library. Ashley Winters, who designed SMOKE, has proposed a library for using static languages with SMOKE, called 'Mirror'. If there was enough demand for static language bindings he might implement that.

Re: Ah, Bindings!! - Martin - 2004-04-26

That's the problem. FreePascal is an OO-Language with (non-trivial) OO features but it cannot interface directly with C++. This is the major hurdle right now unfortunately AFAIK.

Re: Ah, Bindings!! - Ashley Winters - 2004-04-28

The nasty evil part is trying to interface Qt with any language lacking usable argument-based method dispatching. What the hell am I supposed to name the 20 different insertItem() functions in a language limited to one set of arguments per function name? (fortunately for all, the O'CamlQt bindings have no problems here) That alone is enough to stop any serious effort at generating a programmer-friendly C binding. As far as making a programmer-unfriendly C binding for the purpose of improving performance in static languages by allowing JNI-style calls into the wrapper library -- I'd need to see some really bad C# benchmarks, wherein Gtk# is kicking our ass 20x. :)

Re: Ah, Bindings!! - Richard Dale - 2004-04-28

"..fortunately for all, the O'CamlQt bindings have no problems here" And I thought this was another one of our jolly kdebindings April Fools :). Woo hoo! - a functional language using a GUI binding based on message passing OOP. "I'd need to see some really bad C# benchmarks, wherein Gtk# is kicking our ass 20x. :)" Yup no problem, I think I can deliver that sort of thing - I think the initial version may well run at about that speed. Especially for me as the jit doesn't work on PowerPC, and I have to run everything with mint. On the other hand, perhaps gtk# is an example of premature optimisation over design/implementation flexibility. The tortoise and the hare?

Re: Ah, Bindings!! - gerd - 2004-04-26

Lazarus http://lazarus.freepascal.org

pic - taj - 2004-04-26

A lypie pic in which he is not smiling (or fainting). This is what I call cognitive dissonance. I can't deal with it.

Re: pic - Mathieu Chouinard - 2004-04-27

But it look human on this one ;)

Minor correction - Alex is not weird he is 'wierd' - Richard Dale - 2004-04-26

That is his preferred spelling.. He did more for the ruby bindings than he said in the interview - great stuff Alex!

Re: Minor correction - Alex is not weird he is 'wi - Harald Henkel - 2004-04-26

Is there some hidden meaning here ? According to http://www.lcfanfic.com/faq_grammar.html "Wierd is not a word. The correct spelling is Weird." Also my English/German dictionary doesn't know a word wierd. Did you mean wired ~ connected ?

Re: Minor correction - Alex is not weird he is 'wi - Martin - 2004-04-27

http://home.pacific.net.au/~turner23/wierd.html

Re: Minor correction - Alex is not weird he is 'wi - Harald Henkel - 2004-04-27

Thanks for the input :-)

Re: Minor correction - Alex is not weird he is 'wi - Richard Dale - 2004-04-27

"Is there some hidden meaning here ?" No, weird is the correct spelling, 'wierd' isn't a proper word. Hence, 'wierd' is weirder ;) Alex used that spelling once on the kdebindings list, so it's just me being silly - I left off a smiley perhaps. -- Richard

Re: Minor correction - Alex is not weird he is 'wi - Tink - 2004-04-27

The Dutch spelling would be 'wierd' because that's the way it's pronounced and it's popular in the Netherlands to spell it that way. I guess my spelling checker picked it up and changed it to weird. -- Tink

Re: Minor correction - Alex is not weird he is 'wi - lypanov - 2004-04-27

ooohh, wow. your probably right on this tink! i've always wondered why i spell it "wrong" every time :P Alex

Re: Minor correction - Alex is not weird he is 'wierd' - lypanov - 2004-04-27

thank u richard :) for the "great stuff" and for the preferred spelling :P Alex