Rev 4.0 article on TheServerSide

[Neal Campbell]

There are a lot of ways to sell a "new" language: paradigm changes that make
immediate sense to programmers; toolkit environment; ease of learning; and,
maybe doing things that are really difficult in other languages very
elegantly.

Truthfully, I think Rev hits the last two items but not the first two. As a
"traditional" programmer, I think you actually have to unlearn the
traditional way of coding to be proficient in Rev (not that I would claim I
am). People used to looking at the world thru a C-based language will not
find Rev a paradigm changing world, its just different and a large break
from the world they know. Likewise, the toolkit environment is better than
many languages but not near the top of "best in class". In other words, its
not a "language switcher".

The things that Rev really does well is ease of learning and I honestly
think its graphics and multimedia capabilities (as well as the new internet
plugin when it matures) are the world-class stuff. Therefore, I would
personally target those areas for showing how Rev shines.

Concerning the ease of learning:
Now that Revmedia is free, I would get it into every computer possible. Pay
to have Dell include it in their computer set. Give 100 copies to every
school in the world. Start an evangelist-movement on college campuses to
give liberal arts majors an introduction to programming. You might have to
financially support these efforts but if you can get it introduced this way,
it won't be the new C#, it ill be the new Excel.

Concerning doing hard things elegantly:
Instead of trying to fight it out on the blogs, I think having code/project
articles on sites like Beautifulcode.com, Stackoverflow.com, etc. is the way
to go viral. If the magic that I regularly see announced on this reflector
was converted to a "how-to" article on these sites, we eould win by doing
instead of trying to sell something to people who are already happy with
what they have.

Just my 2 cents!

Best wishes for the holidays,
Neal Campbell
Abroham Neal Software
www.abrohamnealsoftware.com
(540) 242 0911

Amateur Radio: K3NC
Blog: http://www.abrohamnealsoftware.com/blog/
DXBase bug reports: email to cases at dxbase.fogbugz.com
Abroham Neal forums: http:/www.abrohamnealsoftware.com/community/





On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 7:24 AM, Kevin Miller <kevin at runrev.com> wrote:

> On 02/12/2009 20:41, "Andre Garzia" <andre at andregarzia.com> wrote:
>
> > Actually I think some of the comments have a point. That language
> > comparision pdf is misleading. Even I could write better code than that
> in
> > those languages. I would suggest people on runrev would change that pdf
> to
> > present optimum code in C++/C#/JAVA and the like, like, very professional
> > code and see how well Rev stacks against it, even if they are all one
> > liners, Rev will be more readable and thus win points. If you post crappy
> > code, the users of those languages will clearly recognize the pdf as a
> bad
> > practice and have a bad impression of the language.
>
> Given the feedback, I think there is room for improvement on our part here.
> The goal of these examples was to present real-world use cases where
> average
> people wrote the code in each of the languages. Programmers generally don't
> write perfect code all the time so that doesn't make for a very realistic
> comparison of how much time the average developer will save on a day to day
> basis. Its not genius vs. genius, its typical user vs. typical user. The
> question we were asking was "Which language is going to be easier in day to
> day use"? For example, the code on the PHP comparison was based on an
> example posted on a site that *teaches* how to write PHP. So clearly its of
> a standard that is used in the real world. If you're an expert coding in
> PHP
> every day you can shorten it. Same with the revTalk example as it happens.
>
> There is a fine line to walk here in terms of actually getting covered and
> creating a talking point with strong headlines and ensuring that we present
> our case in a way that does not detract from our message. Without bold
> headlines and "best case" claims we simply don't get covered, we're not
> interesting or newsworthy. Its been tricky to find ways to articulate our
> advantages clearly to people who have little time or appetite to hear about
> "yet another" language. There isn't anything untrue about what we're
> claiming, there are plenty of customer cases that we can point to who truly
> have made the sorts of savings we have been pushing in our marketing. These
> are real people who have saved a lot of budget or had projects enabled that
> would otherwise not have been done. There are plenty of programmers who
> would write code just like those examples in each of the languages
> presented. And there are always going to be people who will dislike and
> flame Rev whatever we do. But getting coverage means that many other people
> will have an opportunity to take a look and make up their own mind.
>
> As important as all these points are, I wholeheartedly agreed that we have
> to ensure that we hold a sophisticated and informed debate that makes the
> point clearly and in a way that does not detract from our message by people
> getting derailed. One such way for that to happen would be for a subset of
> experienced professional programmers to take our examples in the wrong way.
> So we will take another pass at these examples to see how we can improve
> what we are communicating here.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Kevin
>
> Kevin Miller ~ kevin at runrev.com ~ http://www.runrev.com/
> RunRev - Software construction for everyone
>
>
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