I disagree. That’s not what’s going on. To be honest, I think it was a brave move trying to set the language into a niche where it COULD thrive if they could get other necessary things right. BASIC brings the “I’m not very capable” right in the name. Xojo emulates the new, being capable, it needs few more language features modern languages have (or old ones as local functions) not just renaming Dim to Var. It also should get a label of stable and safe it NEVER got. RealBasic suffered criticisms of being an eternal Beta when I was presented to it. Xojo carried the title over with it. THIS is their bigger Achilles heel against larger adoption right before lacking generics, closures/lambdas, async/await, etc Those are their second problem. The third problem they are trying to address, modern look and feel.
One of the problems with having BASIC in the name is that people think that it’s an interpreted language instead of a compiled one. When I was there, we had to correct that assumption a lot and there were people so stuck in their ways that they just wouldn’t believe it.
A language with BASIC in the name is Doomed. Professors, Seniors and many persons in tech still make jokes about it.
But apart from the name, Xojo is not a modern language anymore. It lacks on Language features many nice programming languages have (as Rick states correctly).
It’s not appealing to the current develop generation out of many reasons.
Not sure how much this initial feeling would affect the “research to know more about it”, but I’m sure that
The Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code carries the “Not for professional use” stigma with that “For Beginners”. Some people could just assume that “only BASIC things can be done with a BASIC language”. There’s a stigma, people from C derivative languages mocks BASIC since forever.
And of course API 2 made it less so… In any case IMO I do think Xojo would have increased it’s popularity more if they had spent more time extending and modernizing the capabilities of core language rather than renaming things and and only adding to the framework (though some of the framework additions were long overdue as well).
XDC will be about 2 hours by rail from me and I won’t be going. You couldn’t pay me to go in to London especially with covid hanging around (my mum being on the critical list, who I look after), I used to live 20 minutes away by train for almost 7 years and I went there twice. Call me a luddite or boring, I just don’t like the place, dirty, unsafe and the the people.
No disrespect to the speakers, but out of all the videos that have ever been made available about XDC I have never once thought that I missed out on something by not going and in most cases I would have been royally disappointed if I had bought the session videos let alone gone to the thing. Some of the videos that have been put out over the years just by xojo have tweaked my interest by name before hand but when it came to seeing the video it was a disappointing quick reading on a few points on the screen and didn’t even go into detail. I feel so sorry for those that are forced to go and hate presenting but have to spend/waste time making a song and dance taking time away from the work they love.
Obviously some will enjoy the physical presence of it more than others but I’m not going to taxi/train/tube hop 2 hours each way, pay for 3-4 nights in London (£1000-£1500) just for a handshake, a nod and a few minutes conversation from someone I spoke to on here. If you have to come from another country with more costs, then I sympathise with you even more.
Honestly, I probably wouldn’t even do a virtual XDC unless it had something substantial to hook me in but considering how small xojo is and how few staff and pros there are to produce never seen before content then it’ll probably just be a reading from Geoff, a few screenshots of Android, a live presentation of pressing some buttons and typing in hello world or a quick run through of someone’s app/solution that has little to no impact on my life or could have been summed up in a 10 minute video on youtube.
I appreciate the efforts of those involved but it just seems like an excuse to have a trip to the UK/London that you can add to a business expense.
Obviously others might not think this way, it’s my feelings/opinion etc.
Damn I’m getting old and grumpy, bah humbug, back under my rock…
From the ones I’ve seen and had an interest in, the issue is that most of the videos seem to be a general introduction or overview of a topic as it applies to xojo, and not have the depth someone who is not a beginner would derive a lot of benefit from.
That said, that was how the user group meeting I presented back in the late 80s or early 90s for a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) was that had about 200 people attending.
When I presented the work I did to add extensive additional functionality to it, I just demoed the features and did not talk about the code… But the audience was not primarily people who wrote code (though some users were also coders)
XDC is probably not big enough to have dual tracks for beginners and experienced xojo coders… but if it was that might help attendance.
This is sort of true. Basic (and Visual Basic and especially VB.net) will rot your brains. BUT the reason I’ve done all kinds of project in VB is that you can get a project done very quickly and you can maintain that project over the long haul. Pragmatism is important in production coding. Unfortunate but true.
If I was sticking to beauty, there are pretty much no modern languages that fit that bill.
BASIC disappeared from REAL long time ago (Real Studio).
Also: most of the time people need solution, not C++.
I restate my sentence:
I want to be able to do this and that. “answer is awaited”…
In other words: they not always ask “What is the name of the hammer you will use ?”
I have another example last month, I was asked to modify a software already in use by a different entity (people in the same kind of work talk together). No one asked me what is my development environlment.
But the problem is not there.
Do you want to create your own business ? Choose your tool.
Are-you searching a job (employment) ? Tell them you use the environment they develop with.
You want to have fun with your computer ?
Try some and stay with the one you like best / that fit your needs (apparently).
You are unhappy with the one you actually run ?
Act accordingly…
Clearly not… XOJO made a deliberate decision to place itself in the citizen programmer/small business/hobby market, so expecting hordes of developers or young people to attend a conference is just not going to happen.