LiveCode has a new eye on the earth

[Bernard Devlin]

Critcising the aesthetics of programmes produced by RAD tools has often
been a way in which "professional programmers" have rubbished the useful
(yet unpolished) tools that literally ran many businesses.  The same thing
happened with Lotus Notes.  It was an environment that permitted thousands
of non-professional programmers (who had the essential knowledge of the
business processes) to produce and continuously refine the programmes they
needed to make money.

Out of the box, Lotus Notes managed to provide end-users with access to a
whole range of features that are even now incredibly hard to find in an IT
system.  From the mid 1980s it had it's own NoSQL database structure; the
databases could be encrypted; the databases could be replicated between
clients/servers (or just between servers); one could work offline, or only
with data on a server; there was field-level access control; it could be
programmed using the @formula language (really, a list-processing language
more like LISP than C) or a variant of VisualBasic.  An application could
be built in hours that would take a "professional programmer" months or
years to build (in order to provide even a subset of the infrastructure a
Notes network provided).

Even today, I can't think of a programming environment that offers
professional programmers the range of features that Notes provided to
non-programming end-users.  I worked in companies where out of sheer
frustration with the IT department taking years to deliver a needed
application, end-users found the online help in Notes, and taught
themselves how to use the IDE, and how to program it, and built their own
applications to solve their business needs.

Lotus Notes was basically destroyed by professional programmers bitching
about the applications looking ugly.  No doubt there are all sorts of
management issues with coding standards, security, maintainability, etc in
such an environment.  But if a business goes bankrupt because they are
missing years of money-making opportunities when building something in Java
or C# takes too long, then niceties like coding standards or the aesthetics
of an application are almost totally irrelevant.

I've seen case studies where Lotus Notes was viewed as in impediment to a
business, because it would cost too much to re-engineer those applications
that ran the business in order to make them buzzword-compliant (never mind
that the business may well have folded if staff had waited years for a
professional solution).  In a business environment the prime concern has to
be that the application serves the business, not that it conform to some
set of non-essential concerns, such as aesthetics.

Bernard


On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 12:18 AM, Geoff Canyon <gcanyon at gmail.com> wrote:

> The key phrase here is (paraphrased): "We load 3000 to 4000 commands into
> the spacecraft daily. It's vital that we check every single command to
> ensure it will execute properly and without harming any part of the
> spacecraft. This check is always done under a short deadline, and it used
> to take three people two hours to perform. LoadChecker automates the whole
> process for a greater degree of reliability, and completes the check in
> just five seconds."
>
> So NASA trusts the safety of a satellite to a program written in LiveCode.
> Pretty is one thing, the safety of satellites is another level.
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Peter M. Brigham <pmbrig at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > On Feb 12, 2013, at 5:31 PM, Mark Wieder wrote:
> >
> > > I don't care about the webpage. Halfway down there's a screenshot of
> the
> > > LiveCode UI command panel. That's the part I'm complaining about. Yes,
> I
> > do get
> > > your point about this being an impressive system, but the part that
> > shows what
> > > LC looks like in action isn't likely to generate any positive interest.
> >
> > I might for those who come in thinking that LC is all about eye candy and
> > can't do any serious lifting. It would probably take less than 2 days for
> > any one of three dozen denizens of this list to re-tool their GUI to make
> > it look spiffy (which can be pointed out to those who care). But NASA was
> > undoubtedly trying to create a tool that works, and they have one, and
> can
> > update it easily as needed. There are lots of folks that we need to
> attract
> > to LC who have been dismissing it as a lightweight hobbyist's playground
> > and who need to know its power.
> >
> > -- Peter
> >
> > Peter M. Brigham
> > pmbrig at gmail.com
> > http://home.comcast.net/~pmbrig
> >
> >
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