Where LiveCode is Now

[Jeff Reynolds]

LC team,

I too so appreciate all the work the LC team has done over the years and continues to do. I’ve used probably a dozen different commercial coding systems over the decades and LC thru all it’s incarnations back to good old MetaCard with Scott was the one that provided the needed options, stability and power to get my multimedia exhibit and education projects done. It’s allowed me to be both designer and developer on projects that has created synergy that has made all the projects come out better. I know the limits of the system and when it’s worth trying to bleed some as it gets you something great and when it’s just not worth it and usually another design approach ends up working better. When I’ve had to work on projects that I couldn’t develop (complexity, timeline, feature needs) and be done in something like C it took way more resources and time and although I had really great programmers and I understood all the basics of what they were doing things could still get lost in translation and some things just turn into a quagmire.

There will always be bugs, feature not there yet, etc in any development system and we each have a very different set of needs and wants and the LC team can’t make us all perfectly happy at once, nor consistently. They are the ones on the front lines trying to make this a profitable business for them (they need to feed their families and they are not our serfs) and make decisions on what the priorities need to be. We can of course lobby for what we think our priorities are (and therefore LC’s), but that doesn’t make it so. 

Many of us have based a lot of our livelihood on LC which is always a risk, but many times completely necessary. Yes I could do my projects more safely in C but I would be very poor as the time needed would suck out any profit at all. It’s always a tradeoff and one that needs constant assessment and not trying to push a development system to the limits as then you are in very dangerous territory — payoffs can be huge but crashes huge as well. I know I have done it in the past and very luckily survived but probably trimmed a few months off my lifespan to pay for it. I’ve run into bugs in the past with LC and have always found a work around for them on the current project and later most have been taken care of in LC, I realize it takes time and priorities are not always mine.

Yes features are always promised but reality always creeps in and resets things all the time. But LC has gone on longer and further and covering more platforms than most any system out there. With every new platform or major feature it adds to the permutations of issues and bugs so things can go at an exponential curve of development anymore and decisions need to be made to best keep all the balls in the air for the whole system.

Richmond, you need to listen to your mother some and if you don’t have something constructive to say try and be quiet some, or just pontificate in cheese instead of being insulting. I’m sorry but your flaming of LC staff (and the community) constantly is just plain annoying. It does no one any good, it’s not the way to make good change. Come to the table with constructive, reasonable and positive comments and not nasty ones. Sorry, you don’t represent this “community”, at least none I am part of. You complain the LC treats us with distain, well I don’t feel like LC does and your comments just fill me with distain for your comments. If you talk like that to others then expect to be treated with distain. 

You probably think I’m an LC cult member, but you are wrong, I’m the last guy in the room cults would go for. I think too much for myself and try to treat others reasonably and keep expectations in line with reality, there are no magic bullets, most all things are based on some thought and work, not a guru spewing truth which you seem to think you do and we should follow suit. Sorry not joining your cult. 

LC all the way back to MetaCard has been a big part of making me a richer livelihood in both money and profession, won me awards, and positively educated many hundreds of thousands with my projects for like 35 years now. That is why I trust the LC team to have the best shot at keeping the boat afloat, not a mantra. For that I keep thanking the LC team all the way back to Scott and Bill Atkinson. Others like Hypercard, toolbook, supercard, Oracle media objects, Authorware, Etc have helped for periods and some specific projects due to particular needs (produce something Apple publishes it better be in HyperCard and make something for Mr Packard and it better run on an hp) but none have lasted and matured like LC has.

Jeff

> On Oct 3, 2019, at 2:15 PM, use-livecode-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:
> Dear List Folks,
> 
> I'd like to reassure you, the team is anything but idle, and the fruits of their labours are coming your way. I don't wish to steal Pano's thunder, but you should look for an announcement on 9.0.5 tomorrow (all being well with the build, which is currently undergoing final checks. Probably I've just jinxed it by mentioning a release date, in direct contravention of my rules.) 9.0.5 has had a fix shoehorned into it for the nasty debugger crashing that was reported not long ago.