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

[Mikey]

HyperCard also suffered from this mentality in both higher education and
corporate environments (I can speak to this first hand).  Part of HC's
problem was that it was slower than compiled applications doing the same
things.  Part of the problem was that color was being widely accepted and
adopted, and other than using ColorizeIt!  or AddMotion, there was no way to
add color to stacks.  SuperCard fixed that problem but SuperCard was a bit
player because HC was free.

Heizer Software came along and added CompileIt!  and Double-XX, both of
which fixed the speed problems, and made it possible to write XFCN's and
XCMD's in HT using the Apple Toolbox API's.  However, in the corporate
environments where I worked as a staffer and as a consultant (in three of
the biggest companies on the planet at their headquarters), the concern was
that third-party add-ons to address the issues actually detracted from the
product, despite the fact that Crystal Reports was becoming accepted as a
way to interface to SQL back ends, and the fact that the 3rd party developer
community for HC was immense.  There were actually mail order catalogs of
3rd party HC add-ons.

The complaints against the language, in a time when Pascal was the new and
accepted standard (Nobody in these cultures was interested in C or C++ yet),
was the fact that it is verbose.  Despite the fact that it was also easier
to read, the general feeling was that since "put 3 into x" instead of
"x:=3;" was too much typing.  Implicit typing was an AppleSoft BASIC thing.
Real men type all their variables.  Yes, I find the rapid recent adoption of
Javascript ironic in light of that.

Part of my initial assignment at Fortune 50 Company was to a) learn all
about a new XCMD/XFCN toolkit to connect our enterprise SQL database server
to HC.  b) Develop an entire system, back end and front end, that would
manage and solve a particular corporate problem.  c) Be ready to demo the
solution on the following Monday.  I was done with EVERYTHING in two days.
That included adding the "fake" color to the application, and running
everything through my personal copies of various Heizer tools to build this
bugger into a standalone double-clickable, compiled application, building
the back-end database.  What I didn't know was that I was in a race against
someone else, using a well-known database RAD tool with all the things I was
adding on already built-in.  This "race" started on Monday of week 1.  The
other guy didn't show up for work on Friday, and his desktop machine was
curiously missing.  It turns out, as I found out later, that he took all day
(and into the evening) Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to complete the non HC
version of the project, and ultimately it was SLOWER than the HC version.
So in 16 hours I completed what took nearly 60 hours in that "other tool".


So the short version of that story is "You're right".  The longer version,
though, is a tale of irrational prejudice, tilting against windmills, and a
failure on the part of HC before, and RR now to radically alter a perception
that is based on an alternate reality and Paradigm Paralysis.  That, my
friends, is the biggest failure of all.  Apple could buy RR or start over
and release a brand-new version of HC.  The chaos that would ensue in
schools and organizations as individuals start building their own
applications to solve particular problems would rival the upheaval that was
threatened in the late 80's and early 90's as HC and then HC2 empowered
folks to stop waiting for IT to pick their noses and instead attack their
own issues.  Yet we are no closer today than we were then, some 20 years
ago.