What's Decker got to do with this?

[richmond62]

https://beyondloom.com/decker/lil.html# ... nglanguage

https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker

Well that just depends:

Aiblins OXT is meant to be a confusing compôte of programming languages aa mixt tegither so no-one kens quite what is going on . .

If that's the case bring Decker on.

BECAUSE, while Decker might just be, on the surface, some sort of Hypercard redeviva, under the surface it is far, far from that: it yaises a leid
caad 'Lil' that is naewhair nearby the xTalk leid:

Code: Select all

on mode a do   # line comment
	r:()
	each x in a
		r[x]:1+r[x]
	end
	extract first key orderby value desc from r
end

mode[1,2,2,3,4,2,1]

If, forbye, OXT is meant to be a debranded version of LiveCode then Decker has naethin aa tae dae wi it at aal.

[richmond62]

As to Decker in and with itself . . . the start screen is just too 1994 . . . complete with bitmapped jaggies . . . which, while being 'all cutesy' are worth Fanny Adams in this day and age.
-

Fanny_Adams_portrait.jpg (102.96 KiB) Viewed 1302 times

-

Screen Shot 2023-09-16 at 19.43.47.png (207.79 KiB) Viewed 1301 times

-
Certainly if by "multimedia' we are meant to understand greyscale jaggies . . .

[richmond62]

I wonder why I am wasting my time, or, why for that matter, anyone would waste their time with this; a bit like why I tend to use my electric drill and leave my Granddad's hand drill in the drawer of family bits-and-bobs:
-

Screen Shot 2023-09-16 at 19.50.05.png (1.04 MiB) Viewed 1301 times

-
Not Now!
-

wheels.jpg (31.9 KiB) Viewed 1298 times

[richmond62]

I am 100% sure that NO erstwhile LC Community users will touch something that does NOT exactly replicate the LC language . . .

[OpenXTalkPaul]

If, forbye, OXT is meant to be a debranded version of LiveCode then Decker has naethin aa tae dae wi it at aal.

I'll say it again, as far as I'm concerned OpenXTalk was never meant to be solely about a debranded version of LiveCode Community Edition, but rather about xTalk in general and open-source xTalk specifically. It happens to be that making a derivative of LC CE is probably the most feature complete, mature, cross platform capable, open-source xTalk that we can put our efforts into.
---

I am 100% sure that NO erstwhile LC Community users will touch something that does NOT exactly replicate the LC language .

Probably why Extension Builder language didn't earn much interest from that community, unfortunately.

As for Decker, I like it even with its forced retro-aesthetic, it has some nice and unique features, it's small, it's fast (much smaller and faster than LC CE's Emscripten Web Engine), it's highly portable / minimal dependencies, the author is updating it regularly and it's getting better.

If people are looking for something more in-line with traditional Hyper/Meta/xCards, as far as language compatibility with LC, then ViperCard would be a better choice. Unfortunately development seems to be a bit stalled-out on that project, or perhaps the author reached thier goal of a web-based HyperCard clone (and nothing more).

[richmond62]

I would argue that LCB / Extension thingy was a slightly cheap way of doing things.

Far, far better had the engineers up north extended xTalk so it had a slew of new capabilities so it could be used to do what LCB was supposed to do.

The pain-in-the bum of having to learn a new programming language was probably too much for most of the 'community' users if, like myself, using LiveCode was NOT the way they earned their bread and cheese, but a secondary or even tertiary consideration.

Of course, our friends in the north have NOW made it possible to make widgets using LC, which is what they should have done with the 'community' edition instead of pulling LCB out of a hat and expecting everyone to run hell-for-leather to learn LCB.

In the light of what will be an increasing divergence between the language 'formerly known as Transcript' it might be useful, while acknowledging OXT's language is a dialect of xTalk, to have a name for this dialect.

We could all suffer from mind-blowing originality and call it 'OXT'. Certainly, as time goes on I shall refer to 'LC' when referencing LiveCode's dialect: refering to OXT's dialect as 'xTalk' pure and simple might be a bit misleading (even if only by implying that it and LC are completely interchangeable, which they no longer are).