Why choose Revolution

[Richard Gaskin]

J. Valle 1234web.net wrote:
> Seems that Revolution has a loyal base of users but is less popular than
> Realbasic, also a lot more expensive, the way documentation is organized
> is not exactly intuitive and the main con is their exotic language and
> programming paradigma.

A lot more expensive? "The Meme That Wouldn't Die." Seems I only hear 
that in discussions with people who've been talking to the RB crowd. 
Curious.

Many, many years ago what is now the Revolution engine was called 
MetaCard, and it was effectively an exclusive private club with a price 
of admission of $995.  I've never met anyone who didn't feel they got an 
outstanding value at that price, but when RunRev acquired the engine 
they introduced two lower-priced options to cover broader markets than 
just the high-end professionals like Sun and Novell (and me <g>) who had 
been using MetaCard.

If you step back from the spin and look carefully at what each package 
provides, I think you'll agree the prices are at least on par.

And yes, Rev is definitely an unusual way of working.  Those who use it 
often report much higher productivity than with more traditional tools, 
but the decision to buy comes down to one's goals.

If you're just looking to flesh out a resume then Java would be your 
better bet.  Like BASIC it's a lower-level language than Rev's 
Transcript, so the number of lines to accomplish a given task is roughly 
on par with other 3GLs.  There are many more tools and examples for Java 
than for proprietary variants of BASIC, it can be used on more 
platforms, and modern Java compilers offer quite good performance; 
indeed a growing number of commercial and open source desktop 
applications are written in Java.  And in terms of jobs, I'd guess the 
number of openings for Java are a few orders of magnitude more than for 
any proprietary language.

But if you're writing software for yourself and clients, you may not 
want to dismss Rev so quickly.  Its unusual paradigm offers unusual 
productivity -- no compile-runtime cycle, strong rich-media support, 
good performance usually at least on par with Java and most BASIC 
implementations, uncommonly simple and efficient string parsing, and a 
lot more.

John Ousterhout's seminal paper on scripting covers a lot on the 
productivity angle of higher-level languages:
<http://www.tcl.tk/doc/scripting.html>

His position on TCL applies to Rev, and then some.

But of course the proof is in the pudding.  I'd recommend doing the 
tutorials in each, and if you decide on one it would be helpful for the 
other to drop the vendor a note to let them know why.

I agree with you on the current documentation structure, though it's 
worth noting that those are being reworked as I write this.  It would be 
a shame if the taxonomy of the current docs prevented you from enjoying 
what Rev has to offer, and it would be valuable for RunRev to know if 
that's the case.

And of course you have this list.  When I was learning Pascal and later 
C and C++, I wouldn't have gotten very far without a strong community to 
help my learning.  That seems to be the case with most languages, so 
you've already taken the most important step toward highly productive 
work with this one.

Keep those questions coming....

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
  _______________________________________________________
  Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com