who's out there?

[Sarah Reichelt]

> I'm curious.  How many of you use Rev to make a living, and how  
> many of you just play with it.  I'm at the point where I can't  
> believe anyone could use it to do serious development.  It is just  
> too buggy, syntax idiosyncrasies and sloth aside.
>
> And how many of you successfully deploy cross-platform  
> applications?  That is my holy grail, but I'm so far away from that  
> I can't even imagine it.
>
Hi Jon,

I started as a hobbyist and progressed until a major portion of my  
day job is programming in Rev. I also do consulting on the side. I  
guess I am fortunate in that 99% of my work is done on and for Mac OS  
X so I don't have to worry too much about cross-platform stuff.

Before coming to HyperCard & then Rev, I taught myself many different  
languages. The lower the level of the language, the higher the  
potential for doing something catastrophic. When teaching myself C, I  
had to restart my computer every few minutes :-) While I would not  
say that Rev is perfect, it is very safe. I find it very rarely  
crashes in the IDE and almost never in standalones.

To answer your specific problems:
Buggy - well it has bugs (check out Bugzilla) but very few are show- 
stoppers and most have known workarounds if you ask the list.
Syntax idiosyncrasies - any new language must appear idiosyncratic at  
first, just because it is different to anything you have used  
previously. If you persevere, you will soon find yourself wondering  
how you ever used anything else :-)
Sloth - I take it from this that you are finding in too slow for your  
needs. There are many techniques for speeding up script execution. If  
there is any particular script or operation that you find is taking  
too long, please let us know and we may be able to point you towards  
a faster method.

Cheers,
Sarah