license issues (was mystery exception)

[Richard Gaskin]

Robert Brenstein wrote:

>> In practice, I think you will find the script limitation to be a
>> completely minor inconvenience, worthy of almost no consideration at
>> all, except as a great big chunk of insurance against the future for
>> all of us.
> 
> Well, this may be true for most people but it can be a show stopper
> for some. Consider a scientific application that involves modelling
> or function fitting. I have written such a program some years ago
> (sold as shareware) and would love to recreate it with MC/Rev (users
> still ask for it but the old code stopped working with OS 8). It
> requires users entering complex math functions that program matches
> to the provided set of experimental data, calculating statistical fit
> and producing graphical output. It would be trivial to run it through
> "do", but the 10-line limit is a killer. The only alternative I see
> is to write my own interpreter/compiler in MetaTalk but that ain't so
> trivial and slows things down.

Precisely.

If all you wanted to do was give away a 12-year effort in crafting a highly
optimized scripting engine by just slapping a five-minute UI on it, you'd
have to work a litte harder than that.

Moreover, as a scripting product it would face the same challenges in
documentation, training, and support as Transcript itself.

Given the relatively few people who enjoy scripting in any given gene pool,
such a product might not do as well as one that offers equivalent
functionality through point-and-click.

For the very small set of tasks that truly require "do", taking a moment to
break them into 10-line chunks would suffice for many of them; more complex
needs will require more effort, but they should anyway:  Trancript is a
great general-purpose language, but is it optimal for statistical modelling?
Could there be another language design that is more effective for that task
than Transcript?  And could it compete with Mathematica?

You'd probably want simpler variable assignments than "put", and tons of
custom functions, in addition to ways to load and parse the input data, etc.

If they truly need wide open general scripting, the various pricing options
for Rev make such power affordable.

But you can't expect to pay once and then turn around and deliver Transcript
as a whole to your end users.  Think of how easy it would be to make an
alternative authoring tool without such limits.  I've seen this happen with
another xTalk, and it became a direct competitor that took a good many sales
away from the tool that made it possible.

Admittedly I'm having a tough time thinking of a commercially viable
opportunity for an app that truly needs dynamic scripting and doesn't
compete with Rev....

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
 Fourth World Media Corporation
 Developer of WebMerge 2.2: Publish any database on any site
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