[metapost] Does MetaPost catch on?

[Hans Hagen]

On 3-9-2010 9:19, Taco Hoekwater wrote:
> On 09/02/2010 10:10 PM, Stephan Hennig wrote:
>>> I like to think the coupling is encouraging the
>>> wider adoption of TeX distributions.
>>
>> Ha, ha! I really like the idea. ;-) But is MetaPost really visible
>> outside TeX world so that it could indeed promote TeX? I tend to think
>> it is not, unfortunately.
>
> I wonder: is MetaPost viable enough such that if it was more visible,
> it would actually be interesting to the outside world?
>
> Unfortunately, I think not. Being a general picture programming
> language, it has none of the specific strengths of the more field-
> specific languages (R, GNUplot, graphviz, ...) and as a generic
> language, it is quite limited compared to other offerings
> (asymptote, PostScript, ..., even pic).
>
> Metapost 2 should be a step in the right direction, but there is
> much more that is missing if we want metapost to be interesting
> to people that are not primarily into in TeX. Some areas that
> could be improved, off the top of my head and in random order:
>
> * inclusion and operations on (bitmapped) graphics
> * animation
> * transparency
> * opentype font support
> * more compact output for large graphics
> * better path operations (intersection and other set operations)
> * native bitmap output
> * efficient large array manipulations
>
> Unfortunately, all of these need programmers ...

also .. asymptote already provides that so it would be a redundant task 
... in that sense I see mp as the fast embedded variant for a specific 
(and limited) class of graphics

Hans

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