A New Year Reflection

[Heriberto Torrado]

Dear friends,

I have been carefully reading your latest emails and wanted to share 
with you some “New Year” reflections.

These days I have been fighting with several Windows and Linux servers, 
and it made me think about how much I miss those NetWare servers from 
the 80s and 90s, and operating systems like MS-DOS or the first versions 
of Windows NT (3.51 and 4.0): robust, simple systems, without activation 
or dependencies on the Internet.

How everything has changed. The complexity of operating systems and 
software has multiplied a thousandfold. Traditional RAD tools such as 
Visual Basic Classic, or Borland’s old Turbo Pascal and Turbo C, have 
disappeared. Today, the last truly professional “live” RAD environments 
are Lazarus IDE and LiveCode.

I deeply miss that simple way of programming—those times when the owner 
of a personal computer was also its programmer, and when small 
neighborhood businesses developed their own applications for management, 
billing, inventory, and so on. Those were good times.

With the arrival of the Internet, large manufacturers such as Microsoft 
and Apple pushed amateur programmers out of the ecosystem and opted 
instead for their own ultra-specialized development platforms.

LiveCode is a reminder of those days when a twelve-year-old boy could 
spend an entire afternoon in front of his computer, trying to understand 
how it worked and how to exploit its possibilities to the fullest. Those 
were the days of thick paper manuals, connections to BBSs, and arguments 
with our parents because we were constantly using the modem.

I honestly don’t know how to help LiveCode Ltd. At the time, I purchased 
an Indy subscription and tried to collaborate as much as I could, but 
programming is only a very small part of my income. I currently work as 
a technology director at a high school in New York, and before that I 
spent 20 years running my own IT company in Spain.

What I am certain about is that LiveCode must continue. Because 
somewhere in the world, there is probably a child who feels the need to 
use a computer for something other than social media and video games. 
And when that child wants to learn how to program, and is confronted 
with the gigantic crap pile of complexity that modern graphical 
programming has become, perhaps—by chance—he or she will discover 
LiveCode and realize that controlling a computer and making the most of 
it can still be simple and fun.

A hug to everyone, and Happy New Year!

Heriberto Torrado