Whither OXT?

[richmond62]

It would seem that there are 2 ways OXT could go:

1. A robust programming "thing" (pace IDE/language) which allows users a wide range of programming possibilities.

2. A "thing" which cannot do that much but relies of "engines", "external libraries", "add-ons", and so forth to get many, many things done that in "traditional programming languages" don't need those "engines", "external libraries", "add-ons", and so forth.

From a pedagogical point of view I support #1.

I do think that this is something that needs to be discussed, or, go for a double system, where, let's say, OXT Lite satisfies #1, and OXT Heavy satisfies #2: BUT, if this is to take place there has to be some sort of divergence, and that has to explained to Joe Public very clearly indeed.

At the moment, several people are getting "kinky" with, mainly, #2, and forgetting that this should NOT be "my personal circle who meet and play whist at my house", but some sort of 'public service': if this is to be a 'public service', and not just what I described, this has to be discussed, and if it ends up as a "private card game", it will die a death undeserving of the effort already put into it.

[FourthWorld]

It would seem that there are 2 ways OXT could go:

1. A robust programming "thing" (pace IDE/language) which allows users a wide range of programming possibilities.

2. A "thing" which cannot do that much but relies of "engines", "external libraries", "add-ons", and so forth to get many, many things done that in "traditional programming languages" don't need those "engines", "external libraries", "add-ons", and so forth.

They are the same thing. C++ needs a compiler and libraries. Java needs an engine, as do Python and LC.

A good IDE makes the components appear unified and cohesive. This is a design challenge, not a technical one.


A separate matter:

..."kinky"..."my personal orgy circle who meet and fffff at my house"..."private orgy"

And earlier:

...intended to guide young (9-12) learners (or, at least complete newcomers)..."hijacked" with comments...NEITHER suitable NOR comprehensible to the demographic I targeted.

Everything written here is public-facing.

Colorful metaphors can be fun among certain audiences where everyone knows each other well and can make allowances for unusual metaphors. But the public at large uses language as they do, and bring expectations that match their own usage.

Many regions around the world, including the US, will have people who look for excuses to vilify just about anything. Handing them fodder to collect selective quotes to form an argument that a web site may not be a good influence for children is as unwise as it is unnecessary.

After some review and cleanup across such posts, I wouldn't mind if my comment here is deleted. Let's stay true to serving the goal of delivering useful software to people of all ages, and leave provocative metaphors to provocateurs.

[richmond62]

In hindsight (always 100%) , your point is quite correct.

[FourthWorld]

Will we be getting a way to edit comments here soon? PHPBB supports it, and it can be helpful in many circumstances. I could probably stand to review my posts here to make sure they're suitable to a diverse audience.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

It would seem that there are 2 ways OXT could go:

1. A robust programming "thing" (pace IDE/language) which allows users a wide range of programming possibilities.

2. A "thing" which cannot do that much but relies of "engines", "external libraries", "add-ons", and so forth to get many, many things done that in "traditional programming languages" don't need those "engines", "external libraries", "add-ons", and so forth.

They are the same thing. C++ needs a compiler and libraries. Java needs an engine, as do Python and LC.

A good IDE makes the components appear unified and cohesive. This is a design challenge, not a technical one.

EXACTLY! They are different ways of saying that same thing!
C/C++ needs runtime(s) and libraries, Objective C built on a runtime (and there is FOSS version as GNUStep), Smalltalk and Java were designed for/as Virtual Machine (basically just another name for runtime engine), JS, Python, Lua, etc. all have multiple runtime interpreters engine(s) available. I mean C and even assembly were created as 'high level' languages! Unless you're writing pure machine code to control every bit of the hardware, you are using some sort of libraries or runtime or 'toolchain' that handles the translations to that.

NONE of them do all that much of anything completely on their own, except for maybe handle bytes of data in memory or read/written on disks or IP sockets, but even those procedures are typically stored in some sort of "Standard Library"! Smalltalk only has a tiny minimal amount of actual defined syntax / reserved words to its spec , everything else in Smalltalk is built up from there.

OXT, MetaTalk,Rev,LiveCode xTalk dialect has only a few scattered handfuls of libraries for actually doing useful stuff with it, beyond what it comes with that is, which is not all that much when compared to just about ANY other programming language ecosystems. Even the commercial version of LC only has a few Externals and Widget sort of things that are useful to some people I suppose (nothing in the Indy+ was ever an all that desirable feature for me, probably the most appealing was all Monte's stuff, which a lot of that is wrappers around Mac/iOS or Google APIs). But it's not anything remotely close to what is available (and often free /liberally licensed open-source) with Python, JavaScript, C/C++, JAVA, or even Lua, or even some lesser market-share ones like Xojo.

Some of those, of those use languages, such as Lua or Python, use libFFI bindings to enable their broad support for doing things. For doing stuff with Apple Devices Lua has LuaObjC, Python has PyObjC, ...So where is xTalkObjC? The beginnings of an 'xTalkObjC' are in OXT AppleNativeLib, OXT AppleImagingLib, OXT AVMIDIPlayer, ApplePDFKit, NSRecord, NSSpeech / AVSpeech, NSSpell wrapper, and a few other wrappers. What I'm saying is that Extension Builder potentially is a way to get on-par Python/Lua... or at least with FreeBASIC or Xojo.

The ONE big advantage xTalk has that those others don't have is the highly readable English-like syntax, and perhaps the ability to run with instant-gratification live UI scripting (although many others now have live interactive-mode 'playgrounds'). The xTalk Language is THE most import thing here, we want to be able to use it everywhere we can and for everything we need or want to use it for. I DO NOT CARE what the xTalk interpreting runtime 'Engine' is, but I do care about what I can do with it. What OpenXTalk IDE has for a runtime is a xTalk Interpreter and an Application Engine that abstracts the underlying Operating Systems, to get to an even higher level above the bare-metal machine code. But the core of it was written 30+ years ago as MetaCard, and then compiled to engine binary updated for various OSes since. Even the Emscripten web version is basically the same engine, just made to compile to WASM.js /WebASM.

A separate matter:

..."kinky"..."my personal orgy circle who meet and fffff at my house"..."private orgy"

And earlier:

...intended to guide young (9-12) learners (or, at least complete newcomers)..."hijacked" with comments...NEITHER suitable NOR comprehensible to the demographic I targeted.

Everything written here is public-facing.

Colorful metaphors can be fun among certain audiences where everyone knows each other well and can make allowances for unusual metaphors. But the public at large uses language as they do, and bring expectations that match their own usage.

Many regions around the world, including the US, will have people who look for excuses to vilify just about anything. Handing them fodder to collect selective quotes to form an argument that a web site may not be a good influence for children is as unwise as it is unnecessary.

After some review and cleanup across such posts, I wouldn't mind if my comment here is deleted. Let's stay true to serving the goal of delivering useful software to people of all ages, and leave provocative metaphors to provocateurs.

This site is about xTalk (preferably FOSS xTalk) so I must agree with this sentiment. This site was not originally intended for children, or even educators of children, although I completely understand why educators would be keen on using xTalk for teaching early computer programming. That's not why I'm here, I'm interested in xTalk as a user who wants to use it to do things. And also I'm a big fan of freedom and speech, I try not to be easily offended and talking about an 'orgy' doesn't bother me at all, so please try to self-censor (Richmond) if you're worried about this being a school-safe site.

Also, try to restrict any political, social commentary, etc. to the Off-Topic sub-forum (I'm probably guilty of that one), or better yet keep that stuff to your own social media account. I've been meaning to write one of those code of conduct standards for ethics / decorum sort of things that some projects have. I don't want to turn off any potential users/contributors regardless of what gender they identify as, or their opinion of some violent territorial disputes based on ancient history, or pretty much anything else that's not about xTalk.

I think you guys should be able to edit your posts now. Sorry, I didn't realize that 'standard moderation' settings didn't allow for that in its defaults.