Larman, I agree about OPL. It\'s not so far from Python (even if Python is far behind).
I do hope you\'re joking ! OPL was a total nightmare right from the start... Its only redeeming virtues were that it was embedded in ROM, thus letting you program on the Psion itself (good for looong meetings ), and that it had crude but effective primitives for the EPOC user interface. So yes, people like me with no C++ knowledge could get going on the platform.
Apart from that, OPL code had all the appeal and long-term manageability of a 15-year-old BASIC dialect, and not a very advanced one at that : meaning, not much. And let\'s not talk (yet again) of Psion support for the OPL programmer community, the OPX mess, staying power, and whatnot.
I truly admire those few heroes who developed king-sized OPL apps in the S5\'s heyday. Having myself spent a lot of time on a small and utilitarian app (an expense recorder, which I still use ) and seen it through a couple of revs, all I can say is that it takes a lot more dedication and tenacity than I\'m ever likely to muster. Especially as sooner or later, when the darned screen ribbon fails, all that will be left of the effort will be memories of sweat and tears and a few thousand lines of legacy code that will never serve any other purpose.
Simply put, having Python on this midget machine, along with a choice of decent code editors (which EPOC never had), feels like a dream : now I can reuse my (admittedly amateurish) experience on Windows and Unix machines to program on the Z, instead of painfully learning yet another framework for code that will die with the platform.
The apple-to-oranges comparison of OPL and Python is so laughable on so many levels that I won\'t start yet another flame war about that. OTOH, I\'m very aware that coding GUI apps with Python and the QTopia port of PyQT is probably harder initially than with OPL for simple things (although surely more productive for larger projects once you\'re on top of the learning curve). And with the somewhat proprietary nature of Sharp\'s version of QTopia, there is always the risk that code may be partly locked-in to the platform and need porting/refactoring down the line.
I don\'t know for sure, and I\'m not likely to try (except out of curiosity), because I don\'t have to. For the sort of simple-minded apps I need or want to make (this time for fun ), it is much simpler to run a custom web app server on the Z (very easy to do in Python) and use Opera or Netfront as the UI. This way I can code and test wherever convenient (on the Z or not). And if/when someday I need/want to run that on whichever next-generation Linux PDA, a Windows PC or even a Unix box, there\'ll be exactly nothing to do except copying some files... I\'ve already done this for a couple of regular desktop apps, and to me the magic of the Z platform is that it works exactly the same..
Sorry for the (partly OT) rant people, Christophe -whom I agree with much of the time - just touched a raw nerve there somewhere
