Richard Gaskin wrote:
> With MC's UI taking a backseat to its feature set (the UI
> favors the only platform that doesn't like to pay for
> software <g>), the development environment has had difficulty
> garnering the market share the interpreter richly deserves.
Its been my experience that 4GLs and development environments like
Hypercard, Metacard, etc don't get any respect from programmers because
they are too easy to use.
Many programmers are highly intelligent, and eat up complex languages
like C and perl for breakfast. Put them in front of something as easy to
use as Metacard and they won't even notice the feature set because they
can't see past how easy to use it is.
Intelligent they might be, but it seems to me they can't break past
their first impression (or is that bias?) that powerful languages have
to have hairy syntax and that simple languages are only for simple
applications. In other words, Metacard isn't a "real" programming tool.
Naturally I don't share that bias :-)
Perhaps what Scott needs to do is add a "just in time" compiler to the
system. This compiler can then use the "professional" version of
Metascript, with all variables accessed via pointers, zero-based arrays,
binary data, and a syntax that combines the readability of perl with the
ease of use of C. Programmers will flock to use it!
--
Steven D'Aprano
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