Cheap Jacks

All sorts of amusements and nonsense unrelated to xTalk
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richmond62
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Cheap Jacks

Post by richmond62 »

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Nothing like recycling old stuff: Fraser Gordon, who is seen on the right side of this picture stopped
working for LiveCode years ago.

I am not sure what, exactly, is going on with LiveCode, but I do sense a sort of desperation.

https://livecode.com/examining-unicode- ... issection/

" In my next post, I’ll show you how you can take advantage of knowing how it all fits together."

https://livecode.com/examining-unicode- ... ting-text/

Fraser moved to Djero in 2017.
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richmond62
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Re: Cheap Jacks

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Not content with the income from selling Commercial LiveCode,
LiveCode are now asking for funding concerning a compiler.
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Re: Cheap Jacks

Post by FourthWorld »

The message it sends to prospective new customers to split core capabilities into two products concerns me.
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Re: Cheap Jacks

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What will result is a set of disparate groups that get smaller and smaller until they go "poof".

And why, why, oh why, will "those people" not listen to what I have been saying re LiveCode as an intro programming tool
for education?
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Re: Cheap Jacks

Post by FourthWorld »

Geoff Moore's "Crossing the Chasm" offers good insight into the technology adoption lifecycle. The synopsis here is a reasonable starting point:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm

The relevance here is that school administrators are on the far side of the chasm. K-12 doesn't push technologies into the lead, they adopt methods that have become leads by what Moore calls "early adopters".

In short, I don't think it's a mistake to present a limited offering to EDU as they're currently doing, while keeping the main focus on indy devs, who have a financial incentive which can be shared.

That is, if marketing per se was happening.

In marketing terms, what LC does is "remarketing", focusing on the existing user base. Everything in the product strategy from frequent reliance on polling current customers for prioritization to bifurcating the product are things that may help retention and upsell but do little if anything for growth.

LC is a product, of course. But as a novel language it's also very much a platform. In tech, products revolve around platforms. There can be any number of IDEs for a language, but none successful if the language is seldom used.

Open source might have been a way to further the platform, and even Kevin's public messaging about ending the open source edition noted that it was 90% of the platform's base.

An earnestly open source project could also have addressed the EDU opportunity as a knock-on, even while maintaining a company focus on indies.

But without active marketing to new prospective adopters a platform cannot grow, regardless of license type.

Of course LC's experiment with open source is now a thing of the past, and given how it ended they can no longer plausibly consider open source again, so open source isn't relevant for any future thinking related to that company. They are now on a course firmly committed to exclusively proprietary licensing, and I wish them well with that.

But OpenXtalk is exclusively open source, so embracing the cultural preferences and expectations of the open source world, particularly GPL advocates, would seem the logical outreach focus for attracting the scope of resources needed for thriving.

Whether schools will come along for the ride is an open question. GPL has features that inhibit commercial investment.

But GPL is the only licence available to OpenXtalk, so those who see GPL as freedom rather than restriction are where platform growth is possible.
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Re: Cheap Jacks

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K-12 doesn't push technologies into the lead, they adopt methods that have become leads by what Moore calls "early adopters".
Apart from the fact that I don't know what 'K-12' means (I suppose this is some US educational term).

My experience is that those who decide what should be taught to kids in schools vis-a-vis computer programming are NOT following
adopters (well, not this side of the pond, at least).

In Bulgaria the Ministry of Education has suddenly announced that all children between the ages of 11 and 13 are to learn Python, which
is now a fairly mature language and widely used.

The Mathematical (specialist) High schools work with C++ and C#.

Over in the UK things are similar. Although there is now a distinctly retro thing to use a form of BBC BASIC with things
like the Arduino.

Today my wife and I have been sorting out 2 flats we own to put up 2 families of Ukrainian refugees who are programmers, and as Plovdiv, Bulgaria
is already hotching with Ukrainian programmers they are being sensible . . . when things calm down (I mean once I have driven them round to a supermarket and got them sorted out food and drink wise, settled their kids at a school, rooted out my kids clothes, and so on)
I shall ask what WAS being taught in the Ukrainian schools.
In short, I don't think it's a mistake to present a limited offering to EDU as they're currently doing, while keeping the main focus on indy devs, who have a financial incentive which can be shared.
Frankly my feeling about their educational presentation on their website is that it is a non-starter . . .

Certainly, once Paul has got things going (i.e. a fairly unchanging IDE that can be downloaded and installed 'just like that') I will start on a series of
webpages that will, basically, consist of a teach-yourself-cum-teacher's-get-up-and-go-guide to host on the OpenXtalk website.

A teachers' magazine based in England called 'Hello World' [that title makes me feel queasy, frankly] want me to write a series of double-spread LC features: I have mentioned this to the "list-Mum" at LC and it bombed like a wet blanket. 'Hello World' have already published 2 short articles of mine: one on the retro virtues of BBC BASIC, and another starting pushing LC.

They have told me that they will get back to me in 2-3 months (no; this is not a "Dear John", because this is what happened before my other 2 articles): and if a solid OpenXtalk IDE is up-and-running (see above) I will write about that NOT LC.

This summer, while I am intending to offer my usual "Get kiddos up-and-running on LC" courses, I am also going to try and seduce a few
teachers for a free course.
That is, if marketing per se was happening.
Yes, well, quite . . . enough has been written about LiveCode's idea of marketing already.

As you have pointed out it consists of preaching to the converted: but as the converted grow older and retire, lose interest, or simply die
that market will soon go 'poof'. And, those who depend on the company's revenue stream are going to either go elsewhere
(c.f. . . . several have decamped), or retire, lose interest, or die.

Unfortunately LC is NOT LibreOffice; i.e. not virtually indispensible.

I do NOT see the lack of a Mac Silicon engine as very important from an educational point of view as ALL Bulgarian, and ALL UK educational establishments in the state sector run with Windows (and the lone nut-case [me] runs Xubuntu in his bat-cave).
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Re: Cheap Jacks

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richmond62 wrote: Sat Mar 05, 2022 9:11 pm
K-12 doesn't push technologies into the lead, they adopt methods that have become leads by what Moore calls "early adopters".
Apart from the fact that I don't know what 'K-12' means (I suppose this is some US educational term).
K-12 is short for Kindergarten through 12th grade, a students 13 years of schooling prior to going to University.
But OpenXtalk is exclusively open source, so embracing the cultural preferences and expectations of the open source world, particularly GPL advocates, would seem the logical outreach focus for attracting the scope of resources needed for thriving.

Whether schools will come along for the ride is an open question. GPL has features that inhibit commercial investment.

But GPL is the only licence available to OpenXtalk, so those who see GPL as freedom rather than restriction are where platform growth is possible.
Absolutely on all points!
There's several FOSS projects I'd like OXT to sort of team-up with or otherwise cooperate with and I'd like to get OXT out on Linux in a highly portable package (I personally like AppImage, but there's also SNAP and other similar) which could increase visibility by getting that package into the related "app store" style 'repo's.
Edu is a definitely an area I'm very interested in for this open source effort.
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Re: Cheap Jacks

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What is NOT pointed out is that while "The Team" is being hired they are unable to work on what should be their main job.
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Re: Cheap Jacks

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richmond62 wrote: Thu Mar 10, 2022 6:22 pm What is NOT pointed out is that while "The Team" is being hired they are unable to work on what should be their main job.
Meh.

The companies behind MongoDB, Drupal, Ubuntu, RedHat, MySQL, and most other platforms I can think of offhand offer services in addition to their products.

With LC I don't know of a time when they didn't offer services.
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Re: Cheap Jacks

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With LC I don't know of a time when they didn't offer services.
True.

Not that that obviates my observation.

And I would say something a bit ruder than 'Meh', were I paying out money for continued development of LC.
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Re: Cheap Jacks

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FourthWorld wrote: Sun Mar 13, 2022 4:02 pm
richmond62 wrote: Thu Mar 10, 2022 6:22 pm What is NOT pointed out is that while "The Team" is being hired they are unable to work on what should be their main job.
Meh.

The companies behind MongoDB, Drupal, Ubuntu, RedHat, MySQL, and most other platforms I can think of offhand offer services in addition to their products.

With LC I don't know of a time when they didn't offer services.
When you list those, it seems that the difference is that with those companies the services ARE the product they're selling, not selling services in addition to selling the software that they're selling services for. Those have all been open source much longer than LCC was and have built up yuge user bases

... OXT I think would be more like FPC (Pascal), Lau, Tcl/Tk, etc., one of those (now days) more obscure packages.
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Re: Cheap Jacks

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The Canonical model seems rather good:

https://canonical.com/

And their "Deliver, maintain, secure and sustain" is a very good mantra indeed.

They give out Ubuntu (Open Source), and they finance that by offering services.
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Re: Cheap Jacks

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OpenXTalkPaul wrote: Fri Mar 18, 2022 8:45 pm ... OXT I think would be more like FPC (Pascal), Lau, Tcl/Tk, etc., one of those (now days) more obscure packages.
FPC/FreePascal and the Lazarus IDE do have a pretty active community, Lua is embedded as a built-in scripting language in hundreds of products. If OXT could achieve a bit of this, it would be cool!
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Re: Cheap Jacks

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tergolap wrote: Wed Mar 30, 2022 6:42 pm
OpenXTalkPaul wrote: Fri Mar 18, 2022 8:45 pm ... OXT I think would be more like FPC (Pascal), Lau, Tcl/Tk, etc., one of those (now days) more obscure packages.
FPC/FreePascal and the Lazarus IDE do have a pretty active community, Lua is embedded as a built-in scripting language in hundreds of products. If OXT could achieve a bit of this, it would be cool!
Sure, and I wouldn't mind including bits of either of those in OXT, Lau certainly could be embedded, maybe wrapped into an Extension Builder package. I can also imagine wrapping FCL and/or various FreePascal Libraries for use from within OXT, as Widgets / set of Widgets, or FFI wrappers libraries.

I'm also thinking a lot about that OpenXION lately. Even though it is command-line oriented (as opposed to an event based app), completely lacking any sort of GUI toolkit, it can, at least in theory, be run any where there is a Java Virtual Machine available... So we already have this highly portable, and quite capable Open Source xTalk, that could already be used as a general scripting language like Python, and it's also a scripting language that can work with other scriptingLanguages so you can already: 'do "--help" as Python' (and other external scripting like bash, AppleScript, VBscript, Ruby, etc.), and then 'get the result' returned to your OpenXION xTalk script. I think much much more could be done with it if anyone tried. Perhaps even more so now then when it was originally developed? Its latest release was like over a decade ago, but still it runs very well for me on BigSur (with OpenJDK installed), and I'm sure it could be bundled up into a nicely portable package with a bunch of extras included. Perhaps there could even be built an OpenXION+JRE+"stack" based "standalone builder' of sorts, that could package up a OpenJDK JavaVM, OpenXION, and your Script files into a nice double-clickable bundle?
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Re: Cheap Jacks

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As Paul just mentioned the charming OpenXION project once again:

Has anyone of the honored guests and members here
ever had any personal contact with its creator Rebecca Bettencourt?

e.g.

https://hypercard.org/interviews/rebecca-bettencourt/

https://github.com/kreativekorp/openxion/wiki/History

It is kind of amazing. She invested a lot of time and effort into the HyperCard universe when HyperCard was already long dead (from a clinical standpoint, pardon me).

I never noticed that she appeared around the LiveCode Community effort but I may be wrong. Thus my question.
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Re: Cheap Jacks

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mdm wrote: Sat Apr 02, 2022 10:34 am As Paul just mentioned the charming OpenXION project once again:

Has anyone of the honored guests and members here
ever had any personal contact with its creator Rebecca Bettencourt?

e.g.

https://hypercard.org/interviews/rebecca-bettencourt/

https://github.com/kreativekorp/openxion/wiki/History

It is kind of amazing. She invested a lot of time and effort into the HyperCard universe when HyperCard was already long dead (from a clinical standpoint, pardon me).

I never noticed that she appeared around the LiveCode Community effort but I may be wrong. Thus my question.
I have reached out to her via e-mail, but for all I know it's sitting in her spam box. I plan to try to contact her via GitHub since I know she is still semi-active on there. I have some stuff to contribute to OpenXION. This past week I've been developing an xTalk library that enables using AppleScript Mac UI (tested with OpenXION, and also works on OXT but it's not really needed there), so instead of command line text-only UI (Answer/Ask/AnswerFiles/etc) you can use graphical dialog boxes(also added extras like chooseFromList, chooseColor, etc). And I'd like to do the same for other OSes by using PyGTK or PyQt.

Since OpenXION is built to run on a Java VM it should run on anything that can run a Java VM (v.5 or better according to the docs, but that's over a decade old now and it still works on the latest OpenJDK). I'm going to be doing some testing with OpenXION on Linux and FreeBSD, but I'm finding that it is already quite capable as a general automation scripting language on macOS (BigSur), thanks to it's ability to run BASH, AppleScript, and Python directly from it's xTalk! I haven't tried it yet, but I assume it can do JSX too (JavaScript for Automation) on macOS too since JavaScript is officially an OSA scripting language that ships with macOS now. It can also import environmental variables and can be used as a Web CGI similar to LC's CLI Server version.

I'm curious if it could perhaps even run compiled bytecode output from Extension Builder, sans OXT/LCC xTalk Engine? Some of Dr. Peter Bretts early posts on the subject of Builder seem to incidicate that it doesn't actually need the IDE/Engine to run that bytecode, and indeed there was once a (perhaps lofty) goal of rebuilding ALL of the IDE with itself and builder, but I gather that idea has been abandoned by the former-mothership.

For working with OpenXION I've been building up an OXT/LCC Stack that acts as a sort of Terminal/IDE for OpenXION, GUI loading of .xn script files, displays the OpenXION dictionary in a Browser Widget, compatible syntax enough that I should able to get syntax colorization working too! (also OpenXION includes a BBEdit plist for using that as an editor). I plan to add a more automated .xn (that's the ext for a XION script file) loading-saving-reloading mechanism to it so that it works more like the OXT/LCC ScriptEditor.

I don't think there would be any conflict for mixing licenses, OpenXION's I believe is licensed as a choice of Apache or LGPL (so OXT GPLv3 compatible).
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Re: Cheap Jacks

Post by tperry2x »

richmond62 wrote: Sat Mar 05, 2022 9:11 pm I do NOT see the lack of a Mac Silicon engine as very important from an educational point of view as ALL Bulgarian, and ALL UK educational establishments in the state sector run with Windows (and the lone nut-case [me] runs Xubuntu in his bat-cave).
haha, exactly like me. (I'm an IT Support tech in a small school with approx 210 Windows PCs)
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Re: Cheap Jacks

Post by OpenXTalkPaul »

tperry2x wrote: Mon Apr 04, 2022 10:09 am
richmond62 wrote: Sat Mar 05, 2022 9:11 pm I do NOT see the lack of a Mac Silicon engine as very important from an educational point of view as ALL Bulgarian
haha, exactly like me. (I'm an IT Support tech in a small school with approx 210 Windows PCs)
Apple Silicon will likely only be a thing for maybe 10% of the desktop (or laptop) computing market, a much higher percentage of mobile market.

One of the nice things about OpenXION that I realized, since the interpreter is built on Java and so a JVM is really the "Engine", and since there's been a bunch of corp. weight behind that, there is already AppleSilicon native JVM and therefore native OpenXION.

Another really nice thing about OpenXION is that it lets you trap-for/replace it's built in syntax.
That's a pretty well "Open Language" :P
You can of example, have a script that is 'on Answer param1,param2,param3,etc" and handle it yourself instead of using the built-in text-based 'Answer' dialog, currently I have it calling AppleScript's basic UI facilities instead (I've always been a Mac person, never iiked text-only UI).
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Re: Cheap Jacks

Post by richmond62 »

2013:
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The last line is instructive.

I donated money, twice.

Funnily enough, I have always understood 'will' to mean 100% and not 'if the fancy takes us'
or an empty promise to attract money.
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Re: Cheap Jacks

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Hot off the press: I think I'll buy 2.

https://livecode.com/book-bundle/
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