Us and them? [was Re: Livecode Dictionary]

[Graham Samuel]

Just covering this one point of Geoff’s in the Dictionary discussion. I agree with his comment, and I think it’s symptomatic of a problem with the development of LC in the last few years: there is IMHO a conflict between the “everyone can code” philosophy that LC inherited (and greatly enriched) from Hypercard, and the perceived need to be more professional and serious as a player in the whole software development arena. 

It’s OK, I think, to provide more facilities for the ‘big picture’ professionals, such as making it easier to use version control and to work in teams, and to have an ever-expanding set of functions and even platforms; but it’s not OK if this is at the expense of the kind of user who doesn’t want to distort the way LC works, for example by deprecating stacks that contain both scripts and UI elements, and who wants to avoid going outside the LC comfort zone as far as is possible, for example to need to use github, or to struggle alone with the elaborate deployment techniques now demanded by the big players in software distribution. This ‘old fashioned’ type of user needs a very clear, understandable environment, and a lot of packaged help with deployment on the various platforms. I am probably hors de combat now, but I would put myself in the second category, despite having a quite technical background in software development.

A typical casualty of this conflict is the cancelling of the ability of these ordinary users to add notes to the dictionary, without apparent thought for the negative consequences.

Just my two (tottering) euro-cents.

Graham

> On 20 Jan 2019, at 03:59, Geoff Canyon via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> 1. Not everyone (very few people?) understand how git/GitHub works.
> 2. Even if you have a reasonable grasp of how to use git it's not obvious
> how to contribute to the dictionary using git.