Transcript and Dot Notation

[Judy Perry]

Nonetheless, as a result, Dan,

Lingo became unlearnable/unapproachable from a verbos syntax point of
view.  And now it's dead. And, yes, the available books/list syntax
help/whatever played a HUGE part.  Handwringing has substantially less to
do with it than the absolute dearth of verbose syntax learning aids that
were available once the dot.syntax folks had their way.

Given the "pressure" (you? Richard? others?) might exert, why should we
think that Rev's approach would be any different than Macromedia's?
e.g., kill the very x-talk nature of Transcript that many of bought into
Rev because of?  Can you name the x-Talk language that's done what you are
asking for, remained an x-Talk, and survived?  Does this mythic beast
exist?  Why are you not using it already then?  Because it doesn't exist,
I suspect.

And why should you be able to get away with dismissing our concerns as
mere "paranoia"?  Do you really mean this?  Does our money spend less well
than yours?

If, as you say, dropping support for verbose syntax is "hardly
inevitable," can you show a single case in a major surviving x-talk
language where this is the case?  What do you know that suggests history
will not repeat itself?

Do you really want to be the father of the end of the last major surviving
x-Talk?

Either Transcript is an x-Talk or it isn't.  Without transparent
implementation of OO, there simply is NOT a medium ground.  Once you add
dot.syntax, Transcript simply no longer is an x-Talk.  Ditto, squared, for
once you then add VB syntax to make those folks happy.  And anything else
that non-x-Talk people want for implementation into Transcript.

Before you know it, what you will have is a mess of a "language" that
almost no-one will be happy with,  no-one can learn, and almost nobody
will be willing to pay to use.

I know I won't.

Given your list of choices, I'm forced to select (a).  When you're done,
will there be sufficient remaining existing and potential users to keep
the company afloat?

Judy

On Sat, 25 Feb 2006, Dan Shafer wrote:

> Seems like there's a fair bit of paranoia abroad in this land. Just
> making dot syntax an alternative -- or even implementing OO syntax
> using it -- doesn't have to corrupt the underlying Transcript syntax
> *except* for those people who choose an  OO approach to their Rev
> projects. Hand-wringing about all the books (how many are there
> again?) and other documents suddenly moving away from the elegant
> xTalk syntax to dot notation for everything isn't necessary or
> appropriate because that's hardly inevitable.
>
> The Lingo case study doesn't work here because Macromedia essentially
> made an internal decision to move away from its proprietary syntax
> (which was quite xTalk-like) to dot notation. I was keenly aware of
> that decision-making process as a consultant to the company and I can
> tell you they were under a lot of pressure from *customers* to make
> that switch.
>
> There are a lot of linguistic-design and other technical reasons
> affecting language performance to consider the dot notation when you
> get into the dynamic allocation of instance methods and properties.
>
> Would you rather have:
>
> (a) No object orientation
> (b) OO with the current syntax with poor performance
> or
> (c) OO with dot notation and acceptable performance
>