Learning LiveCode

Richmond richmondmathewson at gmail.com
Fri Dec 28 06:01:53 EST 2012


On 12/28/2012 12:34 PM, Keith Clarke wrote:
> I know I'm not alone in having great difficulties in getting experienced developers to withhold their judgement on LiveCode being anything more than hobby-ware.

'hobby-ware'; well, yerrs, if all one is looking at are baby things for 
teaching positional adverbs to 8 year olds,

[ but, here, I would have to point out that very many of the parents of 
kids I teach EFL to are prepared to pay over the odds because they see
how quickly kids get their heads round grammatical concepts by using my 
'hobby' programs ]

but, definitely 'NO' if you look at some of the extremely complicated 
stuff that has been done with Livecode.

Personally, having spent about 4 years on my "hobby" [well, according to 
my wife its an obsession] developing something fairly sophisticated
all I would say is:

1. If anything is being developed 'for fun' it constitutes a hobby.

2. What is one person's hobby is another person's bread-winner.

Now; were these 'experienced developers'

[ Hey, here's a thought; I've been developing software of all sorts with 
Hypercard and its successors for 20 years,
and software with kludgy 'traditional' languages from 1976 to 1992; wow; 
I must examine myself in the
bathroom mirror more carefully; I seem to be an experienced developer.]

to sit down and work with Livecode for more than the predictable, 
dismissive 15 minutes, they might change their minds;
instead of spouting bigoted pronouncements based on their stereotypes of 
what constitutes a computer programming languages.

This reminds me of some "prawn" who told me, when I was working near 
Ashkelon about 32 years ago, that Hebrew was incapable
of expressing subtle nuances because it had a core vocabulary of only 
some 10,000 words; while English, on the other hand, having
a lexicon of somewhere around 500,000 words, was far more sophisticated. 
While the figures about the vocab lists are reasonably accurate,
the other statement is complete tosh.

>
> If RunRev want to bring developers across the great divide, there must be a bridge from where the masses reside to the brave new world?

Well, apart from the several grammatical mistakes there . . . I wonder 
if that should not be addressed to the management of RunRev rather
than the Use-List readers.

>
> Is there any kind of 'Rosetta Stone' that relates traditional and OO development concepts to those of LiveCode?

"Traditional"; that's a bit odd, as Hypercard is ancient, and the 
concepts underlying Livecode were all there. Surely that
makes the concepts in Livecode traditional as well.

I remember being told that KiSwahili had 12 genders; a hopeless 
statement that only serves to mislead; all because some
person who was saturated in Indo-European languages tried to impose 
Indo-European Grammatical categories on a
non-Indo-European language; frankly only serving to obfuscate rather 
than clarify.

KiSwahili may have 12 noun categories (and that I haven't checked), but 
they will certainly NOT 'genders' insofar as
Indo-European genders are, historically related to the perceived sex of 
something.

'Traditional' programmers who are looking for magic stones (Urim and 
Thummim, perhaps?) had better get over that
and, setting their prejudices to one side, get down and dig in to 
Livecode for a spot.

>
> Are there any specific switcher's or evaluator's guides targeted at the main development communities, such as .Net, Java, C++, C#...
> Best,
> Keith..
>
>




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