Dumb Newbie Questions -- 1 of N

[Richmond Mathewson]

It may be, of course, that the containers, cards and flip-book metaphor have
had their day. It is obvious in this discussion that those of us who 
have hung
on to it too literally have found ourselves confused.

However, unless we (the loyal, installed user base) and Runtime Revolution
(the people who do the 'real' work in Edinburgh) can work our way towards
another metaphor to replace the one that we are slowly finding no longer
serves our purposes we are going to find ourselves in some sort of
conceptual quagmire; and, frankly, people who take up Runtime Revolution
are going to find it less accessible.

The problem about the word 'property' is that it now seems to be being used
in 2 rather different senses, and I don't see how 'custom' can be 
classed as a
sufficiently strong adjectival modifier to justify that difference.

There is no reason that I can see to abandon the containers, cards and 
flip-book metaphor
(even if, increasingly, programmers are only using a single card) if we 
realise that:

An Object (Stack, Card, Button, Field . . . and so on) can 'contain' a 
number of things:

script
sub-ordinate objects
etc.

and, 'custom properties'.  :(

An Object can have properties (textColor, backgroundColor, visible . . . 
and so on).

The ONLY problem is that something named 'property' is something that can be
contained rather than be a property: so, either, somebody has to cook up 
a new
name for 'custom properties' (err . . . 'custom thingy' . . . err . . . 
come on, somebody
can do better than that), or, somebody has to write a fairly long bit 
about how
users have to do mental backflips.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Of course, if you did not 'cut your teeth', or, at least 'cut your adult 
teeth' (having
ruined your milk teeth on the likes of Fortran) on HyperCard and the 
containers,
cards and flip-book metaphor, and you are not distracted by the stuff 
about that
metaphor in RR's documentation, the whole problem is redundant.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The other problem is that I just had a look at "a" website marketing "a"
programming environment that stated:

"The unique English-like language . . ." [my dots]

Now, if we start using words (such as 'property') for things or ideas 
that are way off
from their standard or prototypical meanings there is a danger that we 
shall fall into
Humpty-Dumptyism (c.f. Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland'); and the 
'unique'
part of that quote above will only serve to obfuscate rather than clarify.

---

Scott Morrow wrote:
>
> On May 1, 2009, at 1:50 AM, Scott Rossi wrote:
>
>> You can think of custom properties as global variables that are tied to
>> objects, instead of variables that float around in space.
>
> That's exactly how I think of them.  Just containers.  Except 
> variables  float around in space (local space or global space rather 
> than outer space), where custom properties you have to say where the 
> container lives (button 3 of card 1 or stack "MainWindow" rather than 
> in the shed)
>
> Scott Morrow
> Elementary Software
>
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