Refactoring is your friend / moving from 6.x to 9.x

[Bob Sneidar]

+1

I'm just elated I can write apps again after such a long drought from Hypercard, and the disappointment I had with Supercard. I personally think LC is what Hypercard should ALWAYS have been, or would have become had Apple had kept it up, or had someone else taken it up. Now I do not develop in Windows or Linux, so there may be/have been some real concerns there. Still, what we can do, what many of us have done is nothing short of breathtaking. My service manager who was rolling his eyes when I told him what I was going to do with Forms Generator is now tickled pink that we can generate forms on demand, on site, that look professional. That app had a lot to do with my present status in the company. I took the job as a copier installer. I'm now the Systems Administrator for the entire comany, and they are training me for Pre-Sales Software Consultation and support. 

I just finished a little utility that takes accounting data export from Toshiba copiers and adds up the color and black totals that make some kind of sense (the export file decidedly does NOT make sense) in a great looking interface, and then outputs a PDF report, or a tab delimited txt file for use in Excel. The customer I wrote it for initially had his doubts about our company, but after I sent him that little gem he LOVES us. So does his accounting department who no longer has to cobble all the data together themselves. 

The time it took to do all this would have been unthinkable in a C derivative or in a Java based environment. Never mind all the new features and updates I've been adding all along. Some may think I'm overstating my case, but I think Livecode stands alone in development environments for speedy development and ease of use. 

Bob S



> On Jan 3, 2019, at 22:40 , Richard Gaskin via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> Read through this whole thread, optimistic that I'd find the list of things that differentiate v6 and v9 so we can hone in on actual solutions.
> 
> I learned two things:
> 
> - lock/unlock changed
> 
> - It's apparently easier to write a thousands of words philosophizing
>   about how a small team of C++ programmers should provide a uniform
>   scripting interface for a nearly unprecedented number of OSes,
>   stay on top of ongoing API changes in every one of those OSes,
>   multiply features, fix bugs, incorporate Unicode, maintain or improve
>   all aspects of performance, and keep the joint running than it is to
>   even briefly summarize concerns about any of the above.
> 
> Is there an actual list of concrete concerns here that the team may be able to take action on or at least explain how/why the change exists, or did I just spend an hour reading that I'll never get back?
> 
> I feel rickrolled.
> 
> 
> I've worked with too many people moving from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, or Python 2 to 3, or any version of Apple's C headers in the '90s that broke declarations quarterly, or HyperCard 2 to 3, to get too out-of-breath about undoing workarounds in old code to work with-the-grain for v9's enhancements and fixes for long-standing anomalies.  When I describe LC's high priority for backward compatibility to nearly any other experienced dev I know, they look at me like I'm high and spouting tales of dancing ponies; many professional development systems consider backward compatibility a very minor nice-to-have, if they devote time to it at all. Many of us here buy computers from a hardware vendor with a similar view.
> 
> As for performance, in threads with Geoff Canyon, Mark Talutto, and others who provided real-world use cases and metrics, we do see some performance degradation in v9 from v6 in some cases, a surprising amount on par given how relatively little work v6 had to do under the hood with encodings and types, a few things a wee bit faster, and overall such a strong comeback from the v7 series that it should be clear to those earnestly following along that the team has indeed been quite evidently working on performance, and delivering improvements over the v9 cycle.
> 
> Then again, my work may not touch the items on the concern list.  I can't know, because I couldn't find such a list in this long thread.
> 
> --
> Richard Gaskin
> Fourth World Systems
> Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
> ____________________________________________________________________
> Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com
> 
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