LiveCode has a new eye on the earth

John Dixon dixonja at hotmail.co.uk
Wed Feb 13 05:28:18 EST 2013


Well said...:-)

Dixie

> Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2013 10:24:02 +0000
> From: bdrunrev at gmail.com

> 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

 		 	   		  


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