Is RR too easy? Or too hard? (was) Is RunRev marketed to developers mainly?

[Noel]

You are going to find all sorts of prejudices in the programming 
world about "ease of use".  Easier it is to use, the less they want 
to give it credit.

Now you do have to see one thing from their viewpoint.  You spend 
years learning how to use c++, you are finally at a point where you 
can do a decent program.  Along comes someone who has been using RR 
for a month or two, and makes a very similar program to what you can do.

The c++ isn't going to be impressed, they have to justify all the 
time and money they spent on learning their language.  If they can't, 
why did they do it all in the first place.  So they aren't going to 
embrace something like RR.

Also consider the consultant that has to charge 10 times as much as a 
RR developer to make a custom program because it honestly takes that 
much longer in other languages.  Are they going to tell a client that 
they are using a slower development system?  No.  They are going to 
tell people that there must be some kind of shortcoming in the RR 
system, otherwise it would take so much longer to do real programming.

I saw this same type of battle ongoing with the DOS vs. Windows 
people.  I couldn't believe how many DOS users wouldn't use Windows 
development tools, because "they had always done it that way" 
before.  Guess what?  Most of them are out of business.

Computer programming is a fluid situation.  There is a momentum that 
must be hit for a language to be "accepted" within the old school 
programming community.  And frankly I don't ever see RR hitting those 
folks.  Which is ok with me, lets move forward instead of trying to 
convert a bunch of "old ways are best" programmers.

In the end, whatever tool you use to accomplish the task at hand is 
the one you want to use.  I just think if you can do it in a much 
simpler and faster fashion, that it is just that much more fun :)

  - Noel

At 10:34 AM 5/29/2008, you wrote:
>Is it true that most programmers say that hypercard isn't
>programming?  Do they say that about RR?  I'm running into that issue
>a little bit.
>
>Some of my students (8th grade and up) think that RR is not a "real"
>programming language.  Why?  It's too easy!  They have the notion --
>shared by a good portion of the general public -- that programming is
>incredibly difficult to do, hard to learn, and mastered only by
>geeks.  Thus, since making things (even executables) using RR is so
>easy, it must not be programming.  This viewpoint is especially
>expressed by students who have dabbled in other languages, like java.
>
>On the other side of the aisle, I'd like to begin urging other
>teachers to begin making their own software to use with their
>classes.  But they think it's too hard!  (Granted, most of them
>haven't really tried it -- they hear words like "programming" or
>"writing software" and shy away.)
>
>Sigh....
>   - marty
>
>--
>Marty Billingsley
>The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools
>
>
>Recently, william humphrey wrote:
>>Since my only experience in programming is with hypercard (and most
>>programmers say that isn't programming) and with web stuff like PHP
>>JAVAscript which has thousands of carefully indexed examples that
>>you can
>>just snip and paste into your projects then I am really not the one to
>>answer this question.
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