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[richmond62]

https://www.itwriting.com/blog/4319-han ... ecode.html
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image12.png (7.65 KiB) Viewed 581 times

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Sorry, couldn't resist that.

One annoyance is that each object, such as a button, has its own script window, which appears as a tab in the editor.

Now that's funny: about 21 years ago, unfortunately, I had to attend classes in Visual BASIC 5 (used to go home at night and reduplicate the exercises in Runtime Revolution), and my main objection was scrolling through a long, long line of code to work out which bit referred to which object.

I did not enjoy working in the IDE which feels quirky and unsophisticated compared to other modern IDEs.

This was written 10 years ago.

[tperry2x]

Not sure how much credence I'd give to someone's article when they can't spell calculator.
I did have to laugh reading through it though. If they found Livecode a little quirky and unsophisticated, what were they expecting? Yes, it's not as developed as visual studio or xcode but it's equally not as complex to use.

So perhaps this reviewer had unrealistic expectations from the outset?

[richmond62]

Of course one could muse on 'revWeb" and similar exercises that folded because:

1. Someone had no stamina to see something through to the end.

0r

2. Someone had badly underestimated how complex something was.

3. Someone had badly overestimated their own capabilities.

4. Someone had bitten off a lot more than they could chew.

5. Someone, having got their paws on the money, 'overlooked' any promises they had made to get it.

We would ALL find it educational to refelct on these things, and how much they might be true about ourselves.

[tperry2x]

I believe Paul has been compiling history of previous xTalks, or at least xTalk related programs and things that can be termed as programming tools.
(I can't find the exact post now). It would be interesting to do a "story-so-far" of xTalk - perhaps one to include in the user guides when they are revamped. Having a concise timeline of what has come and gone over time would certainly shine some light on what was promised and never came to be, for whatever reason.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

I believe Paul has been compiling history of previous xTalks, or at least xTalk related programs and things that can be termed as programming tools.
(I can't find the exact post now). It would be interesting to do a "story-so-far" of xTalk - perhaps one to include in the user guides when they are revamped. Having a concise timeline of what has come and gone over time would certainly shine some light on what was promised and never came to be, for whatever reason.

Yes, this is something that I've wanted to do all along as part of OpenXTalk.org, along with working on the IDE.
Perhaps as an open-source eBook. However towards that end I have really only collected links to source articles and such. Too busy working on other things and writing in all of these forums threads

Part of the motivations for the idea was to have collected the proof showing that Meta/Rev/LC were never really the only game in town and, despite how Kevin sometimes spins it when promoting LC, they didn't invent the xTalk scripting language (although I do think they did the most for xTalk in the long run).

Partly because there were large gaps in my knowledge of the history of xTalk that I wanted to fill in. I knew of SuperCard, MacroMind (later Macromedia, then Adobe) Director, the parent of Flash, when it primarily used the xTalk called Lingo, HyperStudio, and some others, but I don't think I had ever even heard of MetaCard back in the 1990s (even if I had I would not have been able to afford to buy it back then). I don't recall ever hearing of RunRev in the 2000s, and I didn't hear of LC until their first open-source fund drive. So how many others had I not ever heard of? Now I know there were quite a few, such as Gain Momentum, I hadn't ever heard of.

I've also become increasingly concerned about digital obsolescence, as seen in Richmond's screen shot in post#1 and in the link in the comments to a RunRev page that I assume was about 'OpenLanguage' (vaporware). Like 36 years from now, when a lot more of its user-base is 6 feet in the ground, will anyone at all have heard of HyperTalk or xTalk as a family of scripting languages, besides maybe "Computer History Majors" (is that a major yet?) reading about early Macintosh? And if they did and were interested in learning more about xTalk, would they find anything besides videos of Kevin talking as if they had invented the language? Even Wikipedia lacks entrees for many of these things.

[richmond62]

seen in Richmond's screen shot in post#1

revWeb was NOT digital obsolescence, it was ANOTHER of RR/LC's promised projects that never came to fruition because of someone's attention deficit syndrome and nystagamus that meant they were always getting distracted by 'the next big thing' instead of completing anything.