New Forum software being developed
 

Hey,
I just want to inform everybody that I'm working on a brand new bulletin board software. The best feature I have come up with so far is that it will be in about six or more cgi languages (eventually!!): PERL, PHP, Python, C, Java, and ASP. Yes, I know there are other BBS's out there already written in the above languages. BUT, they are all written in one language! My goal is to have ONE BBS written in MANY languages. Also, some BBS's do not use an SQL database but a flat-file database(YaBB). Well, if you see a point/counter-point to this feel free to post it. View the feature list here. If you think there should be more, just post it. Also, if you want to send me a code snippet, just PM it to me and I'll add your username to my Acknowledgements section at the top of the Readme. I hope this will be out in a stable release by the end of the year.

What IS the point? :confused:

The point is that I want to combine the best features of several really good forum systems (like this one) into one so that people don't have to go searching out the one that actually provides what they want in the first place.

No, I mean the point of writing it in numerous languages....

I think you would be best just writing it once in one language and then make it the best you can. I guess maybe I am with DaWei and I don't get the point of writing it in a bunch of languages.

That makes 3 of us...

Its obvious why you should do it in more than 1 language and thats because 1 is the lonliest number. :D but seriously... i agree with DaWei, BigK and AntiNinja.

Generally speaking, when you develop a product, you choose the language according to requirements. Any language that can't produce the required performance goes out the window. After that, evaluate the language in terms of rapid development (time to market), maintainability, and support. A neat language that is going to change radically on the next release, deprecating and obsoleting a bunch of things, is probably not a good choice. A language very few people can program in is probably not a good choice. You get the picture. Code available in multiple languages can rarely, if ever, be called a feature.

Any other approach is generally indicative of a toy project, or a person unfamiliar with the realities of profitable production.

If you mean you have ported it to different languages, so each version runs on one language, that is one thing. If you mean the main software itself requires several different languages to run, that just doesn't seem smart. Think about what that means for the end user. That means the person that attempts to use your software has to have a server with all those languages running on it and configured exactly so. That will really narrow down who can use it.

...or who wants to use it.