Future of AutoHotkey_L.

Discuss the future of the AutoHotkey language
vasili111
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Future of AutoHotkey_L.

15 Feb 2014, 05:30

What will be future of AutoHotkey_L, when AutoHotkey v2 will be released?
I am asking it because, I think we need to take into consideration the experience of other scripting languages, that are maintaining different versions of languages at the same time. For example: Perl 5 and Perl 6, Python 2 and Python 3. The transition is going very slowly or not going at all. For example, as wikipedia says Perl 6 is becoming separate language. On one side, maintaining AutoHotkey_L after AutoHotkey v2 becomes stable can potentially fork community on two sides. I think forking AutoHotkey community is the less desired thing that we need, because community is the basis of AutoHotkey. On the other side, I understand that, there is a lot of code written for AutoHotkey_L and that code gives AutoHotkey the power it has.
What do you think about it?
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gregster
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Re: Future of AutoHotkey_L.

15 Feb 2014, 08:30

What do you think of? If someone asks for AHK 1.1 help, turn him away? That would be a bad idea. Support consists of volunteers only, anyway. You can't force them to ignore 1.1 questions.
I will probably use AHK v2 for new scripts from some point on, but by now, I feel no need or urge to change my old scripts. If AHK v2 is an improvement (I suppose that), it will make its way sooner or later. But if people still like AHK 1.1, let them...
vasili111
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Re: Future of AutoHotkey_L.

16 Feb 2014, 05:08

gregster wrote:What do you think of? If someone asks for AHK 1.1 help, turn him away? That would be a bad idea. Support consists of volunteers only, anyway. You can't force them to ignore 1.1 questions.
I will probably use AHK v2 for new scripts from some point on, but by now, I feel no need or urge to change my old scripts. If AHK v2 is an improvement (I suppose that), it will make its way sooner or later. But if people still like AHK 1.1, let them...
I am not saying that we should not help with AutoHotkey_L questions. I think community should even help with AutoHotkey Basic questions.
I am saying that there should not be 2 parallel AutoHotkey development at the same time. I think we should have one current developing version of AutoHotkey (AutoHotkey v2) and other legacy versions (AutoHotkey_L and AutoHotkey Basic) which are not developing any more. I am also asking community what are they thinking about that.
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lexikos
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Re: Future of AutoHotkey_L.

16 Feb 2014, 06:27

I had intended to stop developing v1.1 (aside from bug fixes) years ago and focus on v2, but ultimately, I work on whatever interests me whenever it interests me. Also, some other developers have contributed to v1.1 since then, and some things I develop for v2 are easily applied to v1.1.
Zelio
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Location: France

Re: Future of AutoHotkey_L.

17 Feb 2014, 07:32

Only "Maintaining" can be done with a AHK 1.1 download link in archive, we don't need to add new things or fix minor bug... If we have a beta then development have to stop, and as always community will continue to help and support the old version during some times, else if people have choice then they don't change...

When we see Python 3 (since 2007) and Perl 6 (since 2000) it is not a "Switch" is is more a flaming war and trolls with programmers who don't want to change. If we exclude case of old project, Perl 6 is a dead corpse and a wrong example because there are better tools to use at this millenium, and Python 3 was in a wrong way to update and upgrade both version during 4 years, now his learning is a pain because a lot of advices ask to start and support with version 2, and if you are not an expert you fall in the abyss of technical issues...
lexikos
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Re: Future of AutoHotkey_L.

17 Feb 2014, 17:35

People are still using v1.0.48.05 more than 4 years after the last update. The community will support whatever they want to.
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joedf
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Re: Future of AutoHotkey_L.

19 Feb 2014, 14:52

lexikos wrote:... ultimately, I work on whatever interests me whenever it interests me...
true, im pretty much the same..

I say that, one shall Never force anything on another user. On the other hand, suggestion is fine.
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jackdunning
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Re: Future of AutoHotkey_L.

22 Aug 2018, 17:46

I recently wrote a series of blogs on this topic ("A Peek at the Coming AutoHotkey V2.0") and find many of the answers to my questions here—although I had assumed them to be as expressed above. The fact that both updates for AutoHotkey v1.1 and regular releases of v2.0 alpha continue now (over four years after the start of this thread) reinforces this theme. Many people have expressed the same concerns.
SOTE
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Re: Future of AutoHotkey_L.

18 Sep 2018, 02:52

Happen to see this while browsing the forum. As a casual user, I think it might be better to do some type of slow merging of the languages. Which kind of appears to be happening. That is, to get AutoHotkey_L as close as possible or can be tolerated to AutoHotkey V2 before promoting it's official release or switch.

I actually like when I see things such as, "Deprecated: This command is not recommended for use in new scripts. Use the StrSplit function instead." Where "StringSplit" was the old way and "StrSplit()" is the newer and V2 way. This makes even casual users like myself pause, and then explore the newer way to do various things, while not breaking any older scripts that they might still be clinging to. This presents situations to start using the newer ways to do things, which falls in line with V2, and would make a switch a bit easier.
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joedf
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Re: Future of AutoHotkey_L.

18 Sep 2018, 15:26

+1
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