You Either Think Graphically or You Don't

[Richard Gaskin]

Happy musings for a Sunday; seems like a good time, I'll bite:

Greg Smith wrote:
> What kind of appication like you want to make is already out there by 
> the dozens?
> Why make a duplicate of an application that exists and already does most 
> of what you want?

versiontracker.com and download.com will tell you how saturated the 
market is for the type of app you want to make.  That a market may seem 
saturated may not necessarily be the case if you can bring something 
compellingly unique to the table.


> Why spend months/years learning to develop something that you could buy 
> for relatively little money from someone else?

If it's truly something you can but off the shelf, don't do it unless 
you do for the sake of doing it.  If it's just for the sake of having it 
you can usually have it for less off the shelf.

I make a lot of my own stuff because I have special needs.  For example, 
there are several hundred text editors out there, but I've tried them 
all and none of them do everything I want so I'm making my own.  Part of 
the benefit of making my own is that it give me lots of parts I can 
reuse in other apps for clients, so it has an exponential long-term 
benefit as well as the satisfaction of a tool that thinks exactly like I do.

> Why "code" at all?

Some of us can't NOT code.  It's like writing, or painting, or anything 
else:  the ones who can't stop themselves from doing it tend to do well, 
if for no other reason than they're not doing anything else. :)

> Has the wheel really been invented over and over again?

That's what the they thought until they made a turbine out of it and 
called it a jet engine.  There's always room for innovation.  It's 
bounds are as limitless as the human imagination.

Two guys in a garage founded Hewlett Packard, revolutionizing the tech 
industry.

Two guys in an apartment used HP parts to found Apple Computer, 
revolutionizing the computer industry.

Two guys in a house a few hundred miles north used Apple computers to 
make Myst, revolutionizing the game industry.

The next revolution is waiting to be discovered, perhaps by two readers 
of this list in a garage somewhere.


> Why is it so hard to make an application without re-inventing something 
> that has already been made thousands of times?

...or a painting that hasn't already been painted, or a story that 
hasn't already been told....

> With all of this talk about object oriented, reusable code, why does it 
> still take so long to produce anything really useful or unique?

Two reasons:

1. C++ isn't portable, no matter how many academic papers were written 
about that in the '80s.

2. Code isn't where creativity comes from; it's the other way around.


> Why does everyone keep inventing new database software?

If you think about it, any collection of things with common properties 
is a database.  There are a lot of things in this world, and only so 
many ways to describe and manage them.

I've been working on my own simple database engine because I needed 
something that works everywhere Rev works, had zero licensing fees, and 
was simple to plug in and use. It doesn't do well with large data sets, 
but then again most of the things I need to manage never come close 
50,000 items; most are just a few thousand, or a few hundred, or a dozen.

So having a single way to define, store, and retrieve data has been a 
worthwhile investment for me, since just about every app needs to store 
and retrieve data.

You start off with generalized read/write routines, then add handlers 
for defining and managing different types of data (file references, 
image data, dates, etc.), and before you know if you've written a modest 
DBMS. :)

And storage is only part of a complete breakfast, the other half being 
binding it to controls for display.  Apple's Core Data handles that well 
-- on OS X only.  Rolling my own storage mechanism with a binding sysem 
lets me get through the day as easily as an XCode programmer, but for 
every platform Rev supports.

So that's why I did it.  Maybe folks who make DB engines are all just 
crazy and have too much time on our hands. :)


> Why don't game creators usually finish what they start?

Myst I through V are done, as is Alida (which was ported to Rev for OS X 
and Windows).  I don't really play a lot of other games, but I see a lot 
shipping so someone's finishing them.

> Why don't more people use Revolution to develop modern style games?

Most modern games use specialized engines that take years to develop and 
cost several million dollars.

But there are many types of games, and just as Myst showed us something 
technologically simple that turned the industry upside down, there are 
several dozen categories of games that have yet to be invented....


> Why can't most artists learn to code?  Why don't most artists even want 
> to try to learn to code?
> 
> I'm an artist and an animator who wants to make his art "do something", 
> but I loathe programming, what can I do, anyway?  Can Revolution help me?

I think it can, but like anything else success will be proportionate to 
effort.

I've always wanted to play piano, but I've never had any interest in 
learning to play piano.  As a result I'm a programmer, and the only 
thing I can to with a piano is wear a black turtleneck and plunk around 
and try to convince people it's experimental music. ;)

> How come I can't think like a machine?

Because a machine is too stupid to count past 1. :)

Fortunately high-level languages like Transcript hide most of the 
machine's stupidity from us so we can focus on human logic.

There are several game engines out there -- have you seen the one from 
Ambrosia?

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