Defining Pet Features and Essentials

[Richmond]

On 12/02/14 12:48, Ender Nafi Elekcioglu wrote:
> Part 2:
>
> These are not my subjective opinions;
> look at this table: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

No; they are not your subjective opinions; they are somebody else's 
subjective opinions, which they are trying
to palm off as objective.

As soon as I see the word "Standard" I start be asking these sorts of 
questions:

1. How 'standardised' is this 'standard' (i.e. how many reputable bodies 
acknowledge and adhere to it) ?

2. How well qualified are the would-be standardisers who have prepared 
this 'standard' (and by 'qualified' I don't necessarily
mean bits of paper from institutions, that can also cover experience and 
so on) ?

For instance, the Unicode standard is a well-established standard 
developed by very many well-qualified people
and backed up by a very large number of people, institutions and 
computer systems.

Notwithstanding how standardised the Unicode standard has become, that 
does not mean that we can use the word 'objective'
anywhere near it.

For the sake or argument: the TIOBE ratings are NOT ratings of use of 
ALL the programming languages/packages that are available,
they are ratings for a set of programming languages/packets that the 
TIOBE people have decided to track. Therefore the TIOBE ratings
are only useful if one wants to compare the members of that set.

"The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, 
courses and third party vendors. "

Wait a minute. What does "skilled engineers" mean? Talk about 'subjective'.

Courses; hmm; I taught Livecode to 10 Primary-level Bulgarians over 6 
weeks last Summer: does that constitute a course, or just a
few loosely structured lessons?

Third Party Vendors: why does that pop a progging lanuage further up the 
ratings? There could be 25 third party vendors selling
RC (RichmondCard; "the programming language of yesterday, today") and 
nobody is buying the thing, while Runtime Revolution has, as far as I'm 
aware, 2 third party vendors; Mirye and something in China, but their 
sales could be vast; and mainly directly from them!

"Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, 
YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings."

I am a single programmer; but if I manage to pump out 1,000,000 mentions 
of my work with the name of the progging language
I use in a month that will show up as much higher than the company down 
the road that employs 1,000 programmers who have
almost no web-presence at all.
> Where is Livecode?
> I want to see Livecode, there; I honestly do.
> And I’m willing to do anything I can to put Livecode into that page.
>
> EDIT just before posting the message:
> ~~~
> I’ve shared that link 2 months ago, back then Xojo/RealBasic wasn’t among the 100 list.
> Now, it’s there. The last one. Xojo made its way through. Excellent, just excellent. [:sarcasm:]
> And we have pluggable themes :/
> ~~~
>
> Nobody can blame RunRev the team, they are trying to stay alive in a very competitive environment.

NO one should not blame the RunRev team; I have a feeling that they are 
well aware of what rubbish rating tend to be.

> So they are willingly or involuntarily been directed to a path their customers choose.
> We want a feature, they’re trying to provide.
> Nobody wants that feature, they even don’t notice the need.
>
>
> This is my business; I’ve built a brand new company two years ago
> and I pay my rent and bills and salaries of my co-workers thanks to Livecode.
> And I earned enough money to live for past two years.
> But you know what?
> I have lost 4 times more in value than I’ve earned because of those issues up there.
>
> * 7 different projects and counting because of 32000pixels group size limit
> People want to see new content loading as soon as they scroll to end; nobody wants pagination.
>
> * 9 different *casual* game projects.
> How casual? One of them is a nice clone of this: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pinch-peeps/id513847077?mt=8
> One of them has just two big turntables, kinda slot machine game.
> If I could rotate those tables without wiggling and some minor animations at the same time, I could have get that project.
>
> * A big, big government project because of the lack of camera feed overlay, it should be an augmented reality app, very simple one.
> How about this toddler:
> Camera feed with physics-> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAEjugyQF-A
> Real time filters -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxMXOrCoMcI
> Yes, Corona is just a toddler compared to the deep roots of Livecode and experience of RunRev team.
>
>
> I could go on but I think I made my point.
>
>
> What I’m doing now?
> I’ve hired a young and sharp fella.
> His only job is getting better in Xcode and learning Corona SDK
> by replicating current Livecode projects alongside us.
> That’s the sole reason why I’m paying to him.
> When he’s proficient enough, I’ll transition to those development environments.
>
> The future is in mobile, clear as day.
> Either Apple or Android or Tizen or Google Glass or whatever brand-new platform which will emerge.
>
> I just can’t afford losing anymore projects.
>
>
> Kindest Regards,
>
> ~ Ender
>
>

So, before jumping up and going "Woof, Woof" in such a way, it is 
perhaps not a bad thing to think about what word such as 'objective',
'standard' and 'ratings' mean.

After all; something programmed by Visual Basic (top of TIOBE for 
February) is NOT being used to control a robot merrily pottering around
on the planet Mars gather data: but Livecode IS. To my mind that is 
hugely significant; much more than the fact that VB is "top of the pops";
and I listen to the Lennerockers not to Beyonce, Lady Gaga or another 
"chart topper"; and the Lennerockers really say it best:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9yCW_0bFwI

"Far from the charts, doing what we love, and loving what we do"

Richmond.