Supercard 4.8 public beta

[Bob Sneidar]

You misunderstood me. By point and click I was referring to the way you MUST program in Filemaker. There is no scripting language for Filemaker, and the result is that something that would take you a half a minute to do with a few lines of code take 5 minutes in Filemaker. I was not referring to the GUI building feature present in both.

Bob S


On Oct 15, 2016, at 05:01 , Richmond <richmondmathewson at gmail.com<mailto:richmondmathewson at gmail.com>> wrote:



On 15.10.2016 07:14, Bob Sneidar wrote:
Filemaker has a point and click programming interface. It just gets in the way. I spent more time perusing the dialog and sub-dialog boxes to try and figure out how to add 1 to a variable that contains 1, that I found myself saying, "Can't I just type a formula??"

I gave up on Filemaker.

Bob S


On Oct 5, 2016, at 10:22 , Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com<mailto:ambassador at fourthworld.com><mailto:ambassador at fourthworld.com>> wrote:

Like Bill Appleton told me shortly after he left his point-and-click authoring tool CourseBuilder behind to make SuperCard, there's a limit on the complexity of systems that can be expressed clearly in any point-and-click UI, and ultimately code becomes the more readable option for any but the most trivial of programs.

After all, how many point-and-click tools used their point-and-click tool to build their IDE? :)

Today most of the point-and-click are gone, even the industry-leading Authorware, while scripting language have taken over much of the world to dominate applications development.

Well, where does that put Livecode?

Or, rather, are you, Richard Gaskin, suggesting that Livecode should be shedding its point-and-click
heritage in favour of becoming a scripting-only language?

While I am sure that is possible, at that point all the hard work that Kevin Miller did to extend
the WYSIWYG aspect of MetaCard will go for nothing, and a very large part of what makes Livecode so
strong will be lost.
*
**Livecode* is not a point-and-click authoring tool, and nor is it something like C++; but it can be seen
as a *hybrid* of these two extremes, where end-users can choose where along that*point-and-click to**
**scripting language continuum* they want to work.

If Livecode's point-and-click interface "just gets in the way" there is no earthly reason why one cannot do the whole thing by scripting alone [frankly, making buttons, fields and other "furniture" by scripting
seems, after years of Livecode 'as it is', unnecessarily tedious], but that doesn't mean it has to
whither-and-die like some sort of Marxist waning away of the state, especially when it is a great strength of Livecode.

Richmond.


--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Systems
Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web

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