Full agreement, Markus. I think it would take the topic far too OT and, as I said, I just wanted to add a few thoughts on the alignment and not contradictoriness between science and philosphy, as far as my experience goes. If you want to look deeper into Max’ theories I can forward you his address, he’s always in good mood for a serious discussion, but I believe your words were rather meant on a general base, or do I err?
I think some of the successful companies were fine with REALbasic until they had to hire developers. You will rarely, if ever, find developers that have Xojo experience which means you end up having to train them. And if those developers are coming from another language they will almost inevitably resist Xojo (lots of reasons there) and push their boss to use a more ‘mainstream’ language.
Is this new language ‘better’? Only better in that perhaps they can find more developers to hire. Which is a valid reason in my opinion. If I can find 20 local people that know but only 1 (if you’re lucky) that knows Xojo then it might make more sense to switch.
Having gone through a hiring process myself recently I feel like I was pretty lucky. My new minion has Xojo experience and has consulting experience just not Xojo consulting experience. Literally, I happened to find the one guy in Kansas City that knew Xojo (not because of me) who had experience and who wanted a change in career.
We’ve had several clients try to find local Xojo people with no luck. I just picked up a gig half way across the country because they were tired of cycling through developers that would learn Xojo and then leave for a better paying job.
This is a big problem for Xojo, I think. I’m not sure how they can capture more mind share and attract more developers to the platform.
That is a factor for companies adopting Xojo for in-house work as well. People like me strat using it to help them with their work… But if the company is large enough to have an IT department they try to kill it because they don’t know Xojo and don’t want to have to wind up supporting Xojo apps built by people like me.
Also if there is any issues on the Windows machinem they tend to want to blame the Xojo apps.
- Karen
For me, there are only two reasons I’d consider a different language.
-
It fits the job better. For example, when I did Feedback’s backend, I used PHP. I couldn’t reuse code with the UI, but PHP made it possible to maintain and debug much faster than if I had built a console app, since I didn’t need to compile.
-
I need more functionality. This is probably the biggest one. Let’s face facts, Xojo will never have 100% feature parity with the native tools. This was hard enough 10 years ago, but now it’s nearly impossible with the rate that operating systems are evolving. There is a very large handful of things that Xojo simply cannot do for one reason or another. For example, OS X and iOS Popover windows are extremely difficult to impossible mainly because there is no equivalent on Windows and Linux. We’re often bound by lowest common denominator. The other reason is just adoption speed. I think it took nearly a year to support OS X full screen, for example.
Xojo is still my tool of choice, but if I need to build a first-class OSX-only application, Swift gets a very serious consideration.
Here’s just the tip of the iceberg:
Django
Panda 3D
BitTorrent
Waitress
Process Craft
Tryton
Modrana
Python is excellent for all sorts of projects. I get that it wasn’t your cup of tea but there’s a huge difference between you not getting it and the language having limited uses/capabilities.
I’ve written an application using Python + Bottle + Waitress to create a JSON-RPC server with a HTML5 UI and run it unchanged on my Windows PC, Linux laptop, Jolla smartphone and Raspberry Pi 2.
Python is already an extremely useful and versatile language and in my opinion the more powerful computing devices become the more different kinds of projects Python becomes viable for.
The government in the UK has recently changed the curriculum for secondary school pupils in order to put coding on the agenda. Here’s an article from the BBC about the change.
I had actually complained to my eldest daughter’s school that training her to make PowerpPoint presentations was not a substitute for educating her about computers so I was glad to find that enough people felt the same to cause a change.
[quote=189254:@Steve Wilson]Here’s just the tip of the iceberg:
Django
Panda 3D
BitTorrent
Waitress
Process Craft
Tryton
Modrana
Python is excellent for all sorts of projects. I get that it wasn’t your cup of tea but there’s a huge difference between you not getting it and the language having limited uses/capabilities.
I’ve written an application using Python + Bottle + Waitress to create a JSON-RPC server with a HTML5 UI and run it unchanged on my Windows PC, Linux laptop, Jolla smartphone and Raspberry Pi 2.
Python is already an extremely useful and versatile language and in my opinion the more powerful computing devices become the more different kinds of projects Python becomes viable for.[/quote]
No language is inherently bad. I have discovered Python as a scripting language for FontLab Studio a few years ago, but obviously it is capable of much more. The thing is, each of us have his own culture. RB/Xojo strongly type, event driven OOP is kind of Latin as opposed to Italian. Grammar is much more demanding, but once one is accustomed to it, the very rigor becomes enjoyable, let alone to prevent bugs due to non typed languages.
I do not know Python enough to make comparisons, but I do regularly use JavaScript and PHP which are weakly typed and more procedural, for their own advantages.
One aspect of Xojo that I always found very attractive is not technical in nature. I have been online since the prehistoric days of Compuserve and Bix, before the Web. I never found such a helpful and generous community as here. There are many places I visit regularly to get information, would that be the Apple Dev forums, Msdn, Livecode forums, Perl Monks or Stack Overflow. But in none of these places will I find people not only replying, but following up until complete resolution. That must count for something.