How many Developers are using Xojo?

My B2B projects are Swift or Java. Xojo is never accepted, when I asked if Xojo is allowed.
Mostly you get ‘Xojo what?’ as the answer. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I know of several former clients that made the decision to move on from Xojo because they could not find anyone with Xojo experience in their area (part of the reason they hired me as a consultant in the first place). They tried hiring developers and training them but just about the time they got good at Xojo they jumped ship for another opportunity. So instead they opted to switch to something the local colleges were teaching.

I usually get something like “xojo? if you dont want to tell me, don’t tell me but don’t make things up”

My experience is similar - I deal with mainly small-medium businesses and I never get asked about the technology stack. I can appreciate that the larger organisations operate somewhat differently mind.

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Yeah there’s a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt about being associated with niche / unknown / weird tools or (gasp!) the cooties of a disparaged language. That problem existed at a lower amplitude with FoxBase / FoxPro / XBase in its waning days but it isn’t the sort of career suicide people seem to fear it is. I just stuck with employers who didn’t make such specious judgments. Made the transition to classic ASP/VBScript and then .NET. I figured if people want to pay me twice as much to be half as productive, who am I to complain?

It all worked out.

Now I’m rusty on the client / web app side of things, and never bothered to figure out some aspects of C# like lambdas, PLUS I’m old. But guess what … no shortage of interview or offers just the same. And I am still capable of picking stuff up. One trick is to get into a tricky problem domain. I took a side gig with a mortgage company and the expectation is that it’s going to take you months to get up to speed with industry regulations, terminology, and requirements. That gave me plenty of time to figure out the tech stack and toolchain. Also, per my direct report, I was the best person they had ever had re: documentation, reverse engineering, and breaking through certain barriers that had been stymying them such as how their code was organized because of a weird plugin system that they didn’t have control over. I did some reflection magic and put them on a better path.

So it all works out, you just have to quit trying to chase every rainbow and appease every company. The ones that get hung up on your past experience or age and such like are asking the wrong questions and you ultimately don’t want to work for them anyway.

All that said, if a client asks about the stack / framework / toolchain you’re going to use, and they don’t like something too unheard-of, then it is what it is. It comes back to the same realization I had 20+ years ago … if you want to pay me twice as much to be half as productive, who am I to complain?

Some of you have too much time on your hands. Can’t remember ever seeing this many comments on a post. LOL. BTW, love Xojo

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I think the answer is simple: not enough.

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Hi Bob, I have seen how you were going those years. But Cansas is not The Netherlands. We have Xojo developers here and those are mostly tied up to a customer for years. The unfamiliarity of Xojo and the unwillingness of existing IT specialists within companies to trust it, remains a major concern.

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Funny enough we had exactly 2 consulting customers in Kansas and both are moving on from Xojo. Former clients in Florida, Tennessee, and Arizona have moved on, or are looking to move on. In all cases they can’t find developers that know Xojo so they are forced to look at more popular development tools. In all cases their apps were stable, mature, and doing fine but they wanted in-house developers to maintain and extend them (rather than using a high priced consultant).

A few years ago I was not happy with the focus on citizen developers, now I believe this is the way to more brand awareness. As long as I am now familiar with Xojo, the platform hardly seems to have grown. Although I don’t know the current number of active licenses. What is known is that the company is still very small in size and vulnerable because the technical knowledge is only with a few developers. I don’t attach much importance to the winged statement that the company has been around for many years already.

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Having an easy to use tool aimed to citizen developers is great for every one as long as it has enough features to also cover the pro needs.

The problem is that putting effort and time on renaming things instead of fixing bugs and add real funcionality is not pro nor citizen :expressionless:

Years ago, there were several blogs, tutorials, training courses, etc… Almosst all of them are now gone, the rest is outdated. Also the community seams to have grown small.

Growth, recognision, awards, carers, etc, etc are succes. Being stuck on the at least we are still here is the oposite.

Always one more than you think!

There is a new shiny tool for everything, but sometimes its nice to have something that is just part of your toolbox. A tool that finds its purpose again and again. That is what Realbasic has been for me years ago and applies even more to Xojo today. Alot of rough edges, but as a whole better than many of the complains about it :wink:

Cheers
Alex

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Xojo perfectly suits my needs, and a major part of my income is a result of what it allows me to do.

But you know what? RealStudio also perfectly suited my needs, with a much better (imo) IDE. I can count on one or two hands the new “features” added since RS that I actually need, use, or find to be improvements. Such a waste.

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@Tim_Parnell Xojo is on TIOBE for December 2022

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Wow, I didn’t think there was an end to this thread.

Now that I’m here, I’d like to ask a question regarding a client that we have been supporting for more than 35 years. Most of the applications they are running are Visual Foxpro. Yes, the very one that MSFT discontinued many years ago. We have also developed a number of separate, although small, applications written in xojo - desktop and web.

However, we would like to rewrite their VFP applications in something more modern for a number of reasons. 1. You never know when MSFT may come out with a Windows version that VFP won’t run on. 2. VFP has become a proprietary language because it’s getting harder and harder to find someone with the expertise to understand and update it. 3. The VFP database, that started with dBase, is no longer considered a common format, so it is also becoming very proprietary.

This all leads me to my question. Is xojo the best choice for replacing the existing applications? We have the expertise to do it, but how much trouble will they have trying to find someone to support those applications if we are not around? They are a very large, privately owned, profitable company with sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars. My worry is that 20 years from now, if xojo is not a growing language or it suddenly disappears, where does that leave my client? My company has had a very successful relationship with this company for more than 35 years and I don’t want to abandon them with software applications that they can’t get support for.

After reading this thread, I would guess that they are more apt to find someone that knows VFP than XOJO right now. Visual Foxpro is still listed on TIOBE in December, 2022.

What I‘m missing in those cases is an LTS version of Xojo.

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I see on this page that Xojo is born the same year as my first daughter. It’s young for a human, but it’s long for a software.

I’m late to this thread and haven’t read the whole thing yet, but please allow me to demonstrate:

dim s as string
dim t as integer

print "What is your name?"
s = input // Historically would have been "input s"

for t = 1 to 100
  print "Hello " + s
next

That is a functioning Xojo program which anyone who grew up with BASIC can recognize. Just look at the language itself: REM, DIM, If Then Else, Break, Str, Asc, Chr

Also, from Xojo’s own homepage, Xojo.com:

  • REALbasic
  • Alternative to VB
  • VB for Mac
  • “… after many years under Windows with VB. Xojo gave me a familiar working environment…”

You have to view the page source to see some of that but there is no doubt to me that Xojo advertises itself as a decendant of BASIC. Which I have absolutely no problem with.

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Aswering the first question is kind of subjective, but answering the the second one will give you an idea. Just use any job search engine to look for Xojo opennings. The demand/jobs you find is directly related to the offer/availability of developpers that can support those applications…

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Well I didn’t grow up with Basic and I don’t use Rem, Dim, Str, Asc, or Chr. Or print or input.

Especially since the latter two don’t appear to exist.

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