newbie response

[Kee Nethery]

I've been trying to decide where I should migrate my personal 
programming environment; Perl, Java, Cocoa, AppleScript Studio, 
RealBasic, Revolution, Python, etc. I've been using Hypercard for 
ages and although Hypercard might not be the fastest code, I can 
develop code that gets the job done in a very short period of time. 
But ... Hypercard is truly dead and after migrating to MacOS X I 
realized it was time for me to make a switch.

I've been following the Revolution lists because it is the closest 
thing available to Hypercard but I've been exploring all the 
alternatives because I've come to believe the dominate opinion that 
Hypercard and things like it, are not real programming environments.

Perl can do anything except it is hell to maintain anyone else's Perl 
code and it doesn't do standalones real well.
Java can do most anything but it does not seem to be a rapid 
development environment. Seems to take Java programmers longer than 
it takes me to write the same widget in Hypercard.
Cocoa looks great but I don't know C, it is Mac only, and all the 
examples assume that you know C which I do not.
AppleScript Studio and the forthcoming revision to AppleScript look 
great but it's still AppleScript and it is Mac only and painful to 
write.
Python looks good but standalones seemed to be an issue.

That left RealBasic and Revolution.

I sat through Geoff's presentation with some other folks at Apple's 
WWDC and then we sat through the RealBasic presentation. Geoff did an 
excellent job but the clincher for me was seeing the RealBasic demo. 
RealBasic just looked more complicated.

So this week I started using Revolution to build a small app that 
connects to a database and grabs some data and displays it. It will 
allow an employee of mine to get data that previously I personally 
would run some SQL to generate. It's not the world's most complicated 
app and it isn't going to save me loads of time but it was a good 
starter. I compiled it for windows, installed it on her machine and 
it works great!

So to everyone on this list, you probably know this already but ...
REVOLUTION IS WAY COOL!!!

Kee Nethery