Marketing Rev in Other Worlds (was Re: Script Limits and solid IDE evolution!)

[Alan Golub]

On Thursday, August 7, 2003, at 03:04 PM, Dan Shafer wrote:

> This discussion of the need for the RunRev folks to market not just 
> the product but the underlying xtalk/xcard paradigm to the world of 
> Windows in particular raises for me another issue that I think 
> prevents the product from achieving the kind of brilliant "Aha!" 
> success it richly deserves. I refer to the out-of-the-box experience.
>
> When I showed my wife HyperCard a few months before it was released, 
> her reaction was, "I get it. Get out of the way and let me play." Her 
> response to Revolution when it opened was, "What's this? Another 
> programming thing?"

If I had a nickel for every time my wife looked over my shoulder and 
said the same thing, I'd be a wealthy, wealthy man!  ;- )

But your point is a good one. There was something inherently inviting 
about HC's home stack -- it encouraged the very response your wife 
experienced. With the exception of internet browsers, and maybe 
FileMaker for quick, template-derived databases, I can't think of any 
other tool that induced this kind of response our of the box.

> Professional programmers are going to be very slow to switch to 
> Revolution or to any xThing for that matter. It's hard enough to get a 
> programmer to change languages even when confronted with a 
> demonstrably superior alternative (I know; I spent a few years trying 
> to do that with Smalltalk).

Ah ... Smalltalk. What an elegant language design that is. I suspect 
that many Cocoa developers enjoy what they do in large part because of 
Objective-C's heavy debt to Smalltalk and it's superior (to Java, C++) 
implementation of OOP. For those of you who've never explored the 
benefits of Smalltalk, check out www.whysmalltalk.com for the status of 
this amazing (and amazingly underutilized) technology.

> The real sweet spot market for Revolution, as it was for HyperCard and 
> the other xCard products, is what I have long been referring to as the 
> Inventive User (IU). IUs are people who:
>
> 1. Know their computers can do so much more to help them with their 
> work than anyone has yet made them do.
> 2. Are smart and creative.
> 3. Can envision the solutions.
> 4. Are not professionally trained programmers or at least if they were 
> at one point no longer earn their living coding
> 5. Probably working in a team or workgroup setting where they are the 
> local IT department
>
> Those folks -- and there are millions of them -- NEED Revolution. 
> Badly. But they're not going to take the time to tinker and learn the 
> product after opening Revolution and being faced with a blank screen 
> and a bunch of loosely connected floating palettes. Heck, they don't 
> even get a blank stack window let alone a starting point.

Interesting, and I include myself as a proud member of the category of 
IUs you describe. But I'm not sure you give us IUs enough credit -- 
shoot, I took the time to learn Rev on my own because I recognized it 
as really cool and really useful. If part of the definition of any IU 
includes "just flat out loves this stuff," why wouldn't they endeavor 
to explore Rev, even if they have to do so on their own time?

> That was HyperCard's genius. Out of the box, it was engaging, enticing 
> and harmless-looking. It *seduced* you into being a programmer. And 
> when it did, you kissed it.
>
> IMNSHO, RunRev should be putting a lot of time, energy and money into 
> creating a dynamite out-of-the-box experience for that category of 
> user. I know how I'd go about that, but it would take a lot of time to 
> develop it and I'm busy writing my books about RunRev at the moment.

Excuses, excuses ;- )

Seriously, I know what you mean. When I first started trying to learn 
Rev, I found myself stuck fairly early on, and I wound up purchasing a 
copy of HyperCard just to see what it could teach me about Rev. As it 
turned out, I learned a great deal. My transition went like this:

1. Played around with Rev until I learned all I could on my own. Felt 
like there was so much more I'd never grasp.

2. Purchased Danny Goodman's HyperCard book. Around the same time, 
Jeanne DeVoto was kind enough to send me a copy of her HyperTalk 2.2 
book. These books, combined, convinced me that it would be worthwhile 
to purchase HC and use it as a learning tool.

3. Purchased HC and spent 2-3 months learning as I read through the 
above books and the excellent manuals that came in the box. By this 
time, the HC interface was positively primitive by OS 9 and X 
standards, but it still worked on the latest version of OS 9, and with 
a few memory configuration adjustments, it never crashed on me.

4. Around this time, SuperCard 4 came out. It was more like HC than Rev 
was or is, and unlike HC, it ran on OS X. I bought it, read the rather 
slim (90 pages?) but helpful manual, and did the tutorials. I really 
liked SC, and still use it sometimes because I find it quite intuitive. 
It also has some features that I wish were available in Rev, such as 
the SuperScript utility which allows you to create an .rtf or .txt file 
containing all (or any subset) of your application's scripts. It's an 
awesome way to see the big picture of your application without having 
to access every script independently.

5. Finally came back to Rev after, what, a 6-8 month absence? Turns 
out, however, that it was worth it. The time spent learning HC and SC 
proved invaluable to my Rev productivity. Things I was unclear on the 
first time around made instant sense. I revisited the Independent Study 
tutorial and actually read through all of Richard Gaskin's excellent 
comments in the code. Even things I hadn't seen before in HC or SC 
(such as the provisions for cross-platform compilation) were completely 
understandable. I attribute this jump over the learning curve (it was 
more of a dance, really, an absolute glide across previously choppy 
waters) to my months spent picking up HC and SC.

Now, I suppose this in a way proves your point. A self-taught IU with 
limited programming experience is not likely to go to the lengths I 
went to to learn Rev, purchasing X number of books and X number of 
development tools, in order to do so. That's just craziness (to which I 
plead guilty)!

As you suggest, the answer may be to focus on building within Rev those 
aspects of HC that were so appealing, encouraging, and inviting. For 
me, it started with the Home stack and it's easily accessible sample 
stacks, from which a great deal could be learned (and learned quickly). 
A close second was the awesome documentation, consisting of a complete 
User's Guide, and a complete HyperTalk guide (there was also a 
supplement, which documented the changes that came with v. 2.4). Armed 
with the above, HC was a tool that anybody could learn.

Rev has the chance to be that tool across three separate platforms. It 
also has a chance to go the way of Smalltalk. Here's hoping it's a 
quick and successful journey towards the former.

Alan S. Golub
Publisher, revJournal