OT2: The 'realness' of languages

George C Brackett gbrackett at luceatlux.com
Mon Dec 22 10:14:07 EST 2008


I'm wondering if this has happened to you:

I recently was talking with a prospective client about extending a  
program I wrote in Revolution for one school (the charter high school  
I helped found) to work with a group of schools sharing common  
interests.  My program has worked well on two platforms for four years  
(we're OS-agnostic), storing data on student behavior on a MySQL  
database accessed via internet, and displaying the data in a variety  
of ways (numeric, graphical, on the web) for teachers, students,  
families, and administrators.  Rev made it easy to write the program  
initially and to modify it as the requirements became clearer with use.

While demonstrating the program, the prospective client (who had made  
it clear to me that she had been involved with many software  
development projects before) asked what the program was written in.   
After I told her I used Revolution for its rapid-development and cross- 
platform capabilities, a subtle change occurred in the conversation.   
She began talking about how I might help with the design, but that of  
course when the design was finished a software firm would take over  
the development (presumably in some 'real' language like C).  I didn't  
bother to tell her I COULD write in C, Java, PERL, PHP and so on,  
because it would be extraordinarily painful to do so.

Has anyone else run into this issue?  Do you dodge the 'what is it  
written in' question?  How can we raise the profile of Revolution as a  
'real' language?  (Never mind what religion it might resemble!)

George




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