Raspberry PI

[Richmond]

On 07/09/2012 07:25 PM, Ken Corey wrote:
>
>
> Again, I'm not Kevin, but I can't see the MakerFaire crowd paying his 
> employee's salaries.
>

I'm not Kevin either (which must be a great relief to him), but I am 
sure that developing
an ARM version of Livecode would cost an arm-and-a-leg (pun intended), 
and may not
be justified commercially.

"an educational version of LiveCode running on the RPI, that supports a 
limited number of stacks/restricted functionality (no standalones?)" 
would probably require no less work (minus the standalone builder) than 
a full-blown ARM version.

Looking backwards (always doing that) I wonder who programmed all the 
engines for Metacard and earlier versions of RR/LC? Maybe the Metacard 
people before they handed things onto RunRev.

Certainly at Metacard version 2.4 there was a "flowering" of engines 
that allowed developers to spin off standalones for a far wider variety 
of operating systems than are currently available. Of course, many
of those engines are for systems that are as old as the hills.

While it may have made sense to cut down on the number of 
engines-for-standalones supported
a while back, RunRev are obviously aware of the need to develop new 
ones; hence Android and so forth. Presumably the reason RunRev stopped 
developing engines for SPARC, SOLARIS INTEL, BSD
and so on was a simple case of diminishing returns.

However, as the Raspberry is, whichever way you put things, a toy, that 
is 99% of the time going to be
used to teach children programming fundamentals, rather than all the 
other, far fancier things other
computers are used for, financial return from developing anything for it 
will be minimal. The only way
to get a decent return on that sort of exercise is rather like the drug 
pusher handing out free cocaine at a party (excuse the rather vulgar 
simile) where he knows there will be a high return of people coming back 
for more. In the case of RunRev this would mean children and/or their 
parents forking
out for Livecode to run on their home PC(s); and just why that should 
naturally stem from them running
Livecode on RPI ARM processors at school I don't understand.

Teaching programming with RR/LC is wonderful; I do it every summer with 
the FREE version 2.2.1 for Linux (and for the purposes of the sort of 
teaching I do one does not really need later versions); but
trying to convince a school head and/or board of governors and/or 
ministry of education that is an
uphill and largely thankless struggle.

Learning BASIC 5 on a Research machine at school and raving about it to 
my Dad didn't make him run
out and buy a computer and the BASIC ROM chips.

"MakerFaire" s are not attended by the faceless people who make odd 
decisions about whither educational computing goes next.

At the Mathematical High School here in Plovdiv they recently decided to 
change the programming environment from one to another because the 
headmaster had a friend who needed a job and he happened to be 
reasonably competent at the "new" programming and not in the "old" one.

Now, don't all jump and tell me that "that's Bulgaria, and things are 
different in our country" because
that is disingenuous. OK, things may be "different" but they are just as 
subjective, and very rarely have
any real education rhyme or reason to them.

Richmond Mathewson.