How alive is LiveCode?

[Sivakatirswami]

Om Shanti
Sivakatirswami

Kauai Aadheenam
On 2/8/12 4:54 PM, Michael Chean wrote:
> When I'm considering a tool I look at the community resources to see
> whether they are
> being kept up.  For instance the RunRev forum,  why is it that the last
> announcement
> of a new release was 4.6?  Do the RunRev staff answer questions?  Why are
> there so many queries
> that languish?   Why do many of the tools including YogaSQL seem to have
> had their last release
> a year or more ago?  Not trying to troll here, but just wondering what your
> impression are.
> Has RunRev been growing?  The language is so elegant I keep thinking that
> there is something
> I'm missing as to why it's not more popular.
>
> Mike
Aloha, Mike:

xTalk has been in the application development world since the day 
Hypercard started in the late 80's. LiveCode is the evolution of that 
set of tools but like modern man in relation to an earlier sub-species.

My Point is simply this: xTalk is never, ever, going to die. It is like 
some species on the planet that have been with us through many 
extinction cycles, but which has survived each one. LiveCode is the 
current Elephant which carries xTalk to the latest robust level, able to 
uproot entire forests in a few days.

It is a very powerful species of programming that can eat any set of 
requirements or use cases alive (get you thru the project from beginning 
to end) faster than any other language you might try to use.

Just because there is a lot of noise about it on the net, doesn't make 
the language your best choice. Someone once tried to sell me on using 
Drupal for web/CMS because they had so many hits, but that's only 
because Drupal is so nasty. You have to practically go to Univerisity to 
use it, or pay for support big time. If you get a CMS that really works, 
then you find the developers are very "quiet" because the thing just 
works and instead of spending all their time posting issues on the 
forums, they are busy getting content up and online (OC Portal is a good 
example of something that "just works")

  So the good stuff that "just works" has less chatter in the digital 
sphere, but that doesn't mean its "inferior" Alexander makes a good 
point that we have  no idea who uses LiveCode for what. Here at 
Himalayan Academy Publications I/we use it for everything imaginable, 
desktop clients for Hinduism Today International daily blog, build web 
slide shows. I have an international network of volunteers using desktop 
clients to download audio files, transcript and upload to our web server 
where almost all the CGI is LiveCode. The Great Adobe's Version Cue for 
In house document revision control was a) a horribly buggy beast which 
cost our editorial team 100's of hours. b) they killed it in the end. 
Instead of going for some Digital Asset Manager that would meet our 
needs, I wrote my on revision control system for InDesign files in less 
that 3 weeks of time (part time). I have a few "apps" on line that I 
built in circa 2000 that *still* get downloaded and run fine on Windows 
or Mac.