Rev 4.0 article on TheServerSide

[Michael Kann]

Amazing. Yesterday I spent the morning in the library reading the O'Reilly book "Beyond Java." It's not worth buying, but if you see it in a library take a look. It is a sales pitch for Ruby replacing Java, but could just as well be about RR. The storyline is that C++ was horrible, Java better, Ruby on Rails is the second coming. The author interviews Java high-flyers who don't use it anymore. They say it is too bloated, too many libraries and dependencies. I had never heard of serverside.com and wrote a note to look it up when I got home. 

About the marketing. When RR hires me to do it, this would be my strategy: Forget about people who know other languages. They won't want to give up what they've learned. If I could program in C++ I probably wouldn't be using RR either. I would put out a bunch of youtube videos showing people of various ages and interests whipping out programs about projects they are interested in. Show a grandma sending a birthday revlet to her grand-daughter. Show a guy in a genetics lab writing a front end to his database. Show RR in schools, in businesses, at home. Videos four minutes long. Show people creating a program that they never thought they could. 

As for the Hypercard/Metacard/RR genealogy, there might be some people who want to still use their Hypercard skills and will find refuge at RR. There is probably a way to attract them without scaring away others. By the way, in our house we always called Metacard Hypercard, now we call Runtime Revolution Metacard. We're always one name behind.

The slashdot readers want computer languages to be complicated because they enjoy the challenge and feel empowered by knowing that they (unlike the average guy or gal) can write "complicated programs in a real language." Most people (especially those who might actually **pay** for software) write code to solve a problem they couldn't do any other way. Those are the people RR should be focusing on.

Enough already.