Call for comments: Rev as a Second Language

[Graham Samuel]

Just to confuse you, my own experience may introduce a third  
perspective. I was a programmer in the heroic days when all that was  
available were barely symbolic machine code assemblers - I mean you  
were lucky to be able to introduce a label that had a human-readable  
name: at one point I wrote a 6000-line assembler program (which used  
among other things LIFO stacks and recursion) without a single  
comment, because there wasn't a comment feature in that Assembler. To  
quote Mark Twain "the statements was interesting, but tough". I then  
progressed to the 'high level' languages of the time, of which my  
favourite was Algol (I suppose nowadays you could call Algol a  
forerunner of Pascal?).

Anyway then my career took me away from the programming coal face for  
several decades. Finally I decided to recycle myself as a programmer,  
since that was the part of my job I had enjoyed the most, and I looked  
for a fun way of doing it. I thought stuff like BASIC and VB  
incredibly clunky, and stuff like 'C' seemed not far enough from the  
old assembler days - OK you were no longer struggling with machine  
code but you were still struggling with a non-human way of expressing  
things. Already a Mac fan, I had a quick brush with Hypercard, then  
SuperCard (at the time when they claimed a cross-platform version was  
just around the corner) and finally to Revolution. And from the fun  
point of view, I believe I made the right choice, and from the  
productivity point of view I was amazed by the power of the thing -  
still am. I was once a geek and paid to be a geek, but now I just want  
to get on with producing stuff without all that tedious mucking about  
just to prevent very simple structural errors etc. I am really happy  
with xTalk and with the whole Rev thing...

Anyway I look forward to the article - good luck with the responses,  
Richard.

Graham

On Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:58:35 -0800, Judy Perry <katheryn.swynford at gmail.com 
 > wrote:
>
> This could be really nice as a set of bookends, that is, a companion  
> piece
> on new users who have never used anything else and Rev is their first
> language (probably not as many of those people, though).
> I'm loving your idea, though!
>
> Judy
> http://revined.blogspot.com
>
> On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 12:04 PM, Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com
>> wrote:
>
>> I'm considering putting an article together for revJournal.com  
>> about the
>> joys and pitfalls of learning Rev from the perspective of those who  
>> already
>> had proficiency in at least one other language before giving Rev a  
>> try.
>>
>> The challenge here is that I've been using Rev so long that I'm  
>> close to
>> completely useless for this other than as an editor and to provide  
>> some
>> structure.  As I envision it, the meat of this article would  
>> consist of
>> quotes from you folks, or more specifically those of you who came  
>> to Rev not
>> from a HyperCard or other xTalk background, but those of you who  
>> never
>> worked with anything like Rev before but have shipped projects in  
>> other
>> languages like VB, Perl, JavaScript, ActionScript, etc.
>>
>> So here's an open invitation to the readers of this list:
>>
>> Feel free to send me an email describing your story of learning  
>> Rev. Make
>> it as long or as short as you like, and consider including things  
>> like:
>>
>> - What language(s) you used before trying Rev, and a bit about
>> your background and experience as a developer
>>
>> - How you first learned about Rev
>>
>> - What you liked most about learning Rev
>>
>> - What you found most annoying about Rev
>>
>> - Any of the good or bad that's changed over time as you became
>> more familiar with Rev
>>
>> And be sure to include this info so I can link back to your site and
>> hopefully bring a few clicks your way:
>>
>> - Name
>> - Title
>> - Company/organization
>> - URL
>>
>> Please send these to:  revjournal at fourthworld.com
>>
>> I'm very interested in learning more about how others see Rev, and  
>> think
>> this will be a good read for the visitors at revJournal.com.
>>
>> Thanks in advance.  Feel free to write if you have any questions -
>>
>> --
>> Richard Gaskin
>> Fourth World
>> Revolution training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
>> Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com