What's everyone working on this month? (September 2016)

[Alex Tweedly]

On 01/09/2016 09:48, Peter TB Brett wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> What exciting LiveCode project(s) are you working on at the moment?
I'll answer that later today (hopefully), but first a rather negative 
alternative Q&A.

Q. What exciting LC projects am I *NOT* working on ?

A. Widgets. (any of them, many of them)
At the conference at the start of August, I learned enough about widgets 
and LCB to be very excited about the possibilities (I still am).
So I spent a good chunk of August working on a couple of widgets (out of 
a long list of exciting widgets I would like to do, or have, or use, or ...)

But in the end I found the programming experience in LCB just too 
frustrating.

I've been spoiled :-)  I'm used to symbolic, interactive debuggers - 
been using them pretty much continually for the last 45 years that I've 
been programming, starting with DDT and a proprietary one in the 70s, on 
to GDB in the 80s and 90s, then interpreted languages for a little 
while, before finally moving up to Revolution / Livecode.
And after trying it for a while, I'm just not willing to go back to the 
dark ages and program in LCB without a decent toolset that provides 
really effective diagnostics and debugging features.

So - I'm not doing any more with widgets until the tools are mature 
enough for it to be an enjoyable experience.  And that really bugs me - 
because there's so much I want to do in widgets, and so much to like 
about LCB - but for me this is a hobby and programming is a pleasure, 
and I just don't enjoy working in the dark and the dark ages :-)

-- Alex.
P.S. I skipped the rant about the missed opportunity to provide an 
interactive, symbolic debugger for website development, that was almost 
there, briefly, with LC Server and on-rev; website scripts are the one 
other situation where we (the entire industry) is still (AFAIK) missing 
a good debugging environment.